Try these simple games to enhance your preschooler’s counting and sorting skills.

• Take a heart shaped candy box (the kind that comes with dividers), and stick a variety of sticker shapes in each section. Choose between star shapes, circles and squares. Each section should have a sticker.
• Take a pile of plastic bottle caps and put a single sticker on each cap.
• Give your child a bowl full of these sticker caps, and ask her to place the cap with the right sticker shape in each section, until all the sections are full.

Use sorting regularly in the kitchen - kids can sort forks and spoons, count peas, count spoonfuls of sugar or salt that you can help them add to a dish. Let them count just about anything that can be separated – fruits and vegetables, butter beans are perfect.

Use little games to stimulate counting skills. “When Mommy and Daddy got married, how many of us were in this house? And then, you came along, and how many of us are we now?”

Or count steps as you go out of the house. How many steps to the gate? How many to the car? And so on.

Use a bean bag passing game to count as you pass the bean bag back and forth. When she can’t count any further, let her stop. You can keep counting, and asking her to repeat after you for the next few numbers.

Learning by rote gets a bad rep, but is one of the easier ways of learning numbers in kids this age, although memorization doesn’t help with understanding quantities (few, many etc.)