Counting and Patterns

When I pulled Jackson out of first grade he could not count past 20.  We worked tirelessly but he finally got it.  Now with Ellie in Kindergarten we are working on numbers.  She is adding already!  But I noticed that she is having difficulty with numbers 11-30 and for the life of me I can't remember what I did with Jackson!  So I put out a cry for help today on facebook.  And I got some wonderful ideas.  But one stuck out and we tried it.

I was really wanting Ellie to realize that counting is just a pattern of 0-9 repeated over and over.  So this is what I did.  I took note cards and wrote 0-29 on them.  I also used different colors for 0-9, 10-19 and 20-29.  I then had her lay out each group of numbers in order.  She has 0-9 down!  So we went to the next set.  She couldn't figure out what came after 11.  She knew it was 12 but wanted to lay down 15.  I asked her to look and see if there was a pattern.  Her little eyes lit up!  "Look!  0 and 0 and 1 and 1!!".  She quickly laid out the rest of the cards!  She was so excited.  We counted each one aloud.  We will keep practicing and eventually I will time her.  Here are some pics!

Sorry the last one is crooked...