The Lama has a favorite book called Can't Sleep Without Sheep by Susanna Leonard Hill about a little girl who can't get to sleep, so her mother suggest counting sheep, but it still takes a long time for her to fall asleep, and the sheep get tired and quit, then all sorts of hijinks ensue when they try to find replacements. Also about sheep, one of the episodes of Signing Time we have has a story, once again about counting sheep and the silly things a girl imagines would happen.
Add these two stories to the Llama's love of numbers and he has been insisting on 'counting sheep' with us lately, but he only has one little sheep Lego figure, so there wasn't much actual counting going on. I added a new poster to our wall, with the numbers 1-20 to extend his counting range. He loves the poster, but it just wasn’t sheep.
So I made some counting sheep for him. I took some sheep doodles I had made for another project, cleaned them up, and printed them out in card stock. Then I glued them to Popsicle sticks and now we have bunches of counting sheep!
I’ll hold up a random number of sheep, and he'll count them off. Or I'll ask him to hand me a number of sheep. He is loving them. And, as a bonus, they make great little puppets for farm/sheep imaginative play too!
If you would like to make your own counting sheep, you can download the PDF here
