That sounds great cgod! Those are all really good things to do! After your daughter has counted like, 8, things, try adding one more and asking "how many now?" and see if she can answer without counting again. Try taking them away one at a time to practice one-fewer relationships as well. Only 20% of 1st graders can count backwards from 25. Counting by 2s and 3s and 5s and other multiples are really fun too.

By the time my daughter was in 1st grade she could add and subtract 3 digit numbers mentally, including numbers that crossed over hundreds, and she could manage things like 135 minus 200. Her amazing number sense continued until she learned the standard algorithm -- and then she could no longer add mentally. She eventually came back to mental math, but it really made me mad that they started teaching the algorithm in her class when most of the kids had very little number sense. Algorithms are the beginning of the end for kids and math, they literally stop thinking at that point.

I see lots of complaints from parents in the US about the "new" methods of teaching -- many schools are starting to focus on a variety of mental math methods which I think is absolutely brilliant. Parents are dead set against it because they don't understand that this is really really important. Parents see kids doing strange ways of subtracting 17 from 45 for example by thinking "17 + 3 is twenty, plus 20 more is 23, and 5 more makes 28" or thinking 45 - 17 is the same as 48 - 20 (add 3 to both parts) and so its 28. Parents insist that this is a waste of time when they learned to just write out the algorithm and manipulate digits and get the answer. But that is a rant for another day.

Keep up the good work!