Talking about the numbers you see as you go about your day is an effective way to help young children begin to learn about numbers. Point out numbers that you see on clocks, calendars and signs to your child and talk about them. Count toys, shoes and other objects as you clean up or count count apples and bananas while shopping at the grocery store. Take a walk around the neighborhood, a store, a school or the library and look for numbers as you go. Look for teachable moments throughout your day to reinforce your child's number recognition.
Provide lots of opportunities for children to interact with numbers in their everyday play. Magnetic numbers, foam numbers for the bathtub, calculators and pretend cash registers are fun ways for children to involve numbers in their playtime.
Preschoolers learn best while playing and having fun, so play games to teach number recognition to your child. You can easily make a bingo game to teach your child about number recognition. Make several bingo grids with five rows of five squares. Then write numbers in each square. Write each number on a small card and put them all in a larger container. Draw a number from the container and have your child cover the number on his card with a penny or dried bean. Continue playing until someone gets five in a row covered.
I Spy is another fun game you can adapt to practice number recognition. You can play at home, in the car or anywhere you see a lot of numbers. Take turns spying a certain number and letting the other person try to find it. You can also make I Spy game boards by cutting numbers out of magazines or using number stickers. Put them on a piece of card stock in random order. Then call out a number and have your child try to find it.
Make a number book with your child. Write the numbers from one to ten on ten pieces of paper. Then look for the numbers in magazines and newspapers with your child, cut them out and glue them on the page of the same number. You can also look for pictures of groups of things to add to the pages, like three apples or two eyes. If you are doing this activity in a preschool classroom, give pairs of children a number to look for and then bind all of the finished pages into a book.
Read lots of counting books with young children. As you read, look at the different numbers and point out their different features. Some counting books for preschoolers are "Ten Black Dots" by Donald Crews,"Over in the Ocean" by Marianne Berkes and "1, 2, 3 to the Zoo: A Counting Book" by Eric Carle.