It's easy to teach counting when you've got a few good ideas up your sleeve. Young students need a lot of repetition when they are learning to count. The more practice you can get in, the better. These ideas may seem similar to you (as they all involve counting something), but I guarantee that they will seem like very different activities to your students.

1. The Block Tower. Using blocks, have the children build up a tower. Once they reach 10 blocks, they can knock the tower down. If you teach young children, make sure that you are holding the tower steady as they build it up. There's nothing worse than the tower falling down on its own!

2. Eggs/Food. Have them count 10 things into a shopping basket. We have many toy eggs at our school, so this is what I use. But any food can work. After they've counted out the 10 items, let them walk around the room to pretend that they're coming home.

3. Legos/Connecting Blocks. Students can count legos (or another type of connecting block) as they put them together. You can also work on patterning skills here and have them alternate different colored blocks.

4. Stairs. Count the stairs whenever you go up or down. For that matter, count anything that's around them. 5 carrots on their lunch plate. 7 buttons on their jacket.

5. Songs. Every month, try to pick at least one song that deals with counting and play it at least once a day.

6. Group Effort. If you're trying to teach counting to higher numbers, it's hard to let every child have a turn to do it by themselves. Instead, work as a group. For example, let each child put just one block on the tower.

7. The 100 Circle. Have your students sit in a circle. Go around the circle, having each kid say the next number. Count all the way to 100. To make this more challenging for older kids, create a rule that the student is "out" if he or she makes a mistake. This way, you can have a contest to see which student can count the highest.

These seven ways to teach counting are simple to do and give students the repetition they need to learn to count. I hope that soon, you won't be able to stop them from counting!

Shannon Tani has many years of experience teaching ESL preschool in Japan. She writes and maintains Teach ESL to Kids which is a resource helping ESL teachers of (very) young learners. http://www.teach-esl-to-kids.com/