Ten Apples Up On Top is a book by Dr Seuss.  We use this book to reinforce oral and one-to-one counting to 10.  Over two days we did two counting activities with this book.  The first one had the numbers in order and the second one had random numbers.  The children had to read the numeral and put the correct number of apples on the animals head (we did this by printing using paint and glue sticks).  The first day the numbers were in order and we learnt that if we don’t keep our lines straight then we will run out of space at the end.  So on the second day we tried to keep our lines straight.  Why didn’t I rule the children lines?  Because a big part of being a mathematician is organising the maths – so we keep the maths messy!  Our columns we much straighter on day 2!