We received these Snap n Learn Counting Elephants from Learning Resources to review a few days ago, and we've been busy finding lots of ways to play with them!  They are great for Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy as they can be used for counting, number recognition, colour and size identification, sorting and matching.

Counting and Number Recognition
There are 10 elephants in the set, each with a number on it's back from 1 - 10.  

Ethan is getting very good at counting with me, which surprises me at such a young age.  He certainly doesn't say all of the numbers properly, but when I lined up the elephants and pointed at each one and said the number he said his 'numbers' with me.  Then when I asked him to put all of the elephants back into the pot, I counted as each one when in and again he 'counted' with me.

Colours
The elephants come in 5 different colours (red, yellow, blue, green and purple) and there are 2 elephants in each colour.

Ethan is just starting to learn his colours, he can say the colour 'blue' and often does identify it correctly, but hasn't mastered any other colour names yet.  Today I went through each of the colours of the elephants and asked Ethan to repeat the colour name.  Then I got out a serving tray with sections so that we could try out some sorting.  I handed Ethan one elephant at a time (different colours) and he automatically just put them in different sections.  Then when I handed him one in a repeated colour I asked him to find the one that was the same, and to start with I pointed at the other elephant and then he put the matching one down beside it.  After a couple of these he was sometimes able to put the elephant down with it's matching colour.  This is definitely something that we can do again and again as he continues to learn about colours.




Size
There are 2 different sizes of elephants, 5 large ones and 5 small ones (1 small and 1 large of each colour).

Ethan and I called the different sizes the Mommies and the Babies (this seemed easier than introducing the size names to begin with, as these are words that he can say, we can learn 'big' and 'small' when he's ready).  We went through all of the elephants from the pot saying 'Mommy' for the big ones and 'Baby' for the small ones.  Then I put one 'Mommy' elephant in the 'jungle' (a print out of some trees on a piece of card) and one 'Baby' elephant in the 'watering hole' (a print out of a lake on a piece of card).  Then I handed Ethan one elephant at a time asking him to put it with the other 'Mommies' or 'Babies'.  He was able to do this with some help from me (pointing) and lots of encouragement :)




Free Play
These elephants have plenty of opportunities for learning about numbers, colours and size, but they are also great little elephants to play with generally.  Each elephant's trunk can hook onto another elephant's tail making the elephants into a great little train that Ethan liked to pull along the floor.  The snap together trunks and tails were also great for a sort of 'fishing' game that we played, using one elephant to pick up another.  We also made a house for the elephants out of blocks and gave them some little trees to snack on and a watering hole to drink from.



Discount offer!
If you order online from Learning Resources and use the code BLOGGER13 during checkout you will get free delivery on all orders.  Offer valid until December 31st 2013.  (Let me know what you order!)


* This has been a review post, Learning Resources sent me the Counting Elephants set so that we could play with them and write a review for them. To see more about my review process please click here. *