Homemade Counting Game from Catalog Pictures

I'm starting to get piles and piles of catalogs in the mail ('tis the season!).  Instead of throwing these directly in the trash, I decided to cut out some of the photographs to create a seasonal counting game.  It was really easy to put this homemade math game together, and the girls (3 years old) loved it...

I was amazed by the number and variety of objects I found to cut out of the catalogs.  There were plenty of items representing numbers from one to twelve (I could have found some groups with a larger number of items, but it wasn't needed for the game I had in mind).  I put most of the pictures I cut out into an envelope for use in future games, and picked out photos for 1-9 items representing the Fall season:

I glued the pictures onto colored paper circles, labeled some plastic lids 1-9, and.. voila!  The girls had a new counting game:

To 'play', each child picked a card and counted the objects before placing the card in the correct lid.  It was a great exercise in counting with one-to-one correspondence (point to each object once while counting).  The girls liked talking about the various objects on the cards, and both of them repeated the activity multiple times.  This was so easy to make, and now I can quickly generate new variations on this counting activity by picking out some fresh seasonal pictures and maybe some different colored paper, and presenting it to the kids as a 'new game'.

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