Bakery Counting Game

With this counting activity, I was trying to tap into a couple of Wugs' interests: cakes and money!  It's a scenario that he encounters at least twice a week at the supermarket.  Usually I am paying by card, but he at least understands that something must be exchanged in order to take the items away.  Outside our supermarket is "Lamb's Cupcake" shop where we pay by cash and whenever we take a taxi, we get Wugs to pay the "uncle" using cash.

In this game, I made Wugs the baker so he had the satisfaction of collecting all the coins.  I asked him if I could have a cake, if he could tell me how much it was and then in front of the cake, I counted out the number of coins, so he could make the association between the number on the cake and the coins being counted.  We've played this game about 3 times and the first time, he ran off with all the coins!  (I learned to put out just enough coins to play the game).  By the third time, we played a whole game together and later that day I found him counting during his free play, so something must have stuck.

What we used:
Play food (real food would have worked just as well)
Plastic coins (real coins would have worked.  For us they would have been a choking hazard)
Labels
Marker pen