Number Dot-to-Dot 1-20

Counting out loud is easy to fake. Counting while hunting for the next number is not: a child has to know that 14 comes after 13 and then find it somewhere on the page. Every picture in this book has exactly twenty dots, numbered 1 to 20.

The twelve pictures

A star, a heart, a house, an apple, a moon, a tree, a rocket, a kite, a crown, an arrow, an ice cream and a diamond — the same outlines as the alphabet dot-to-dot, so a child who has done both meets the same pictures twice and notices.

Where it gets hard

At the teens, every time. A child who counts to twenty perfectly out loud will often stall at the written 13, 14, 15, because the words and the numerals do not agree: fourteen says four first, but 14 writes the ten first. If that is where the pencil stops, the problem is the numerals, not the counting.

What twenty dots can and cannot draw

Twenty points is enough for a shape with straight edges or one smooth curve, and not enough for anything with fine detail. Every outline here was picked to survive it, and the ones that could not — a butterfly, a six-petal flower — are simply not in the book, because a dot-to-dot that does not produce the promised picture is worse than no dot-to-dot at all.

After the dots

Color the finished outline in. The lines are plain and unshaded for exactly that reason.

What comes next

Counting Worksheets 1-20 if the teens are the sticking point, or Number Tracing 1-20 if the numerals themselves are.

Printing this one correctly

In your printer dialog set Scale to 100% or Actual size, not Fit to page. Fit to page shrinks the tracing letters and they stop matching the size a child's hand is learning.

Plain paper is fine for crayons and pencils. If your child uses felt pens, 100 gsm paper stops the ink bleeding to the next sheet.