Counting in Tens with the Squirrels: A Waldorf Homeschooling Story for Place Value, Addition and Subtraction
Oct 25, 2026
How this story came to be
This is the story I used to bring place value to my son Kanav and his friend Nirvaan in their first school years, when I was homeschooling them the Waldorf way during the pandemic. Through it, children come to understand how we write numbers beyond nine, and then add and subtract with that understanding, long before they ever hear the words "decimal number system".
I never wrote it down. It grew in me day by day as I told it, and I received it more than I planned it. Each morning I would sit with the boys and the next part would arrive. Years later I told it again to two older girls who joined my class and were beginning mathematics afresh, and it held them just as well.
I am sharing it here so that any parent or teacher of a child in Grade 1 or 2 can use it. The story is written so it can be read or retold aloud. After each part you will find teacher notes on how I worked with it: the practice, the drawings, the bead work and the bookwork.
The board that greeted the children on the first day of our Grade 2 homeschool year. The great tree with its hollow was already waiting for the squirrels.
What the story carries
Counting beyond nine, and why ten is written with two digits
Grouping in tens, then tens of tens, then tens of hundreds
Place value as "rooms" or "slates", each with one job
Counting in fives through tally marks, which also becomes the five times table
Addition with carrying, and subtraction with and without opening a bundle
A felt sense of large quantities, imagined all the way up to a crore
A note on the age. In Waldorf education, the change of teeth around seven is taken as a sign that the child is ready for formal learning. The story begins at exactly this threshold, and the children who hear it are standing at the same one.
Part One: The Cosmos Meadow
To be told over several mornings. The breaks marked below are natural places to pause and pick up the next day.
The girl and her mother
Far away, in a land of rolling hills, there was a wide green meadow. All through the meadow grew cosmos flowers, yellow and white, nodding on their thin stems whenever the wind passed by. In the middle of the meadow stood a small wooden house, and in that house lived a little girl with her mother and her father.
Her father was a woodcutter. Every morning he took his axe and walked to the forest at the edge of the meadow. He chopped wood, carried it to the village and sold it, and in the evening he came home tired and happy.
There was no school near the meadow. The nearest village was far, and so the little girl stayed home with her mother. And her mother was her teacher.
But for a long time, her mother never taught her anything at all. There were no lessons and no instructions. The little girl simply did whatever her mother did. When her mother kneaded dough, the little girl kneaded a small lump of her own. When her mother swept the floor, the little girl swept beside her. They picked flowers together, dug the vegetable patch in the backyard together, mended torn clothes together, and sang songs together while they worked. Whatever her mother's hands did, the little girl's hands learned to do too.
And so the years went by, until the little girl was seven.
The first tooth
One morning, as she bit into a piece of bread, something wobbled and fell into her palm. It was her very first tooth.
She ran to her mother, holding it up high. Her mother looked at the tiny white tooth and then at her daughter, and her face filled with a great smile.
"Congratulations," she said. "Now you are ready to start learning."
The little girl felt something new stir inside her. She had always loved doing things with her mother. But now there was a different kind of wish in her, a wish to know. She wanted to understand things. She felt awake in a new way, and she could hardly wait to begin.
So her mother began to teach her. Just as she taught her the letters through beautiful stories, she also taught her numbers.
Pause here
Counting the flowers
Every morning, the little girl loved to step out into the meadow and pick cosmos flowers to brighten the house. There were so many that she could pick as many as she liked.
But now, as she picked them, she felt a new wish. She wanted to know how many she had. So she brought her bunch inside, laid the flowers on the table one by one, and began to count.
"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine..."
And there she stopped. There were still flowers left on the table, but she did not know what came after nine. In her little years she had learned to count by listening to her mother, and her mother's songs and games had always stopped at nine.
Her mother came and sat beside her. "After nine comes ten," she said. "Then eleven. Then twelve." And they counted the rest of the flowers together.
Writing the numbers
The little girl had already learned to write her letters, and now she wanted to write her numbers too. So her mother showed her. She drew a 1, a 2, a 3, and every number up to 9, and the little girl copied each one carefully, saying its name as she wrote.
Then she asked, "And how do I write ten?"
Her mother smiled. "Hold up your hands," she said. "Count your fingers."
The little girl counted. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine..." and then she lifted the very last finger, "...ten!"
"Ten fingers," said her mother. "So we will count everything in tens. Up to nine, every number has its own shape. But when we reach ten, something new happens. Let me show you."
Pause here
The first bundle
The next morning they went out to pick flowers together. The little girl picked one, then another, counting as she went. When she had nine flowers in her hand, she picked one more. Ten.
Her mother took a long blade of grass, wrapped it around the ten stems and tied a little knot. She laid the bundle down on the grass.
"There," she said. "One bundle of ten."
Then the little girl began again with single flowers. One, two, three, four... all the way to nine, and then one more. Her mother tied them up too, and laid the second bundle beside the first.
"Two bundles of ten," said the little girl, and she felt very pleased.
The two slates
When they came home, her mother brought out two small slates and a piece of chalk.
She placed one slate on the right. "This is the slate for ones," she said. "Here we write how many single flowers we have."
Then she placed the other slate to its left. "And this is the slate for tens. Here we write how many bundles of ten we have."
They started all over again. The little girl laid down one flower, and on the slate for ones she wrote 1. She laid down a second flower, wiped away the 1, and wrote 2. A third flower, and she wrote 3. And so on, wiping and writing, until the slate for ones said 9.
Then she picked up the tenth flower. Her mother helped her tie all ten into a bundle. Now there were no single flowers left on the table at all.
"So what do we write on the slate for ones?" asked her mother.
The little girl thought. "Nothing. There are no single flowers."
"When there is nothing, we write a zero," said her mother. So the little girl wiped away the 9 and wrote 0.
"And on the slate for tens?"
"One bundle!" And she wrote 1 on the slate for tens.
She looked at the two slates side by side. There it was: 1 0. Ten.
"That is how we write ten," said her mother. "One bundle, and no single flowers."
Then the little girl laid down another single flower. On the slate for ones, she wiped away the 0 and wrote 1. Now the slates said 1 1. Eleven. One bundle and one flower.
The little girl clapped her hands. She understood! Every number she would ever write was simply telling her how many bundles and how many single flowers she had.
The big bunch
Day after day the little girl counted her flowers this way. Her mother gave her two baskets: a small one for single flowers and a bigger one for bundles of ten.
Then one spring morning, when the meadow was thick with blossoms, she picked so many flowers that she made nine bundles of ten, and then nine more single flowers. Ninety nine! And then she picked just one more.
The single flowers became a new bundle. Now there were ten bundles in the basket.
"Ten bundles," said her mother. "And what do we do when we reach ten?"
"We tie them together!" cried the little girl.
So they tied the ten bundles into one great bunch of a hundred flowers. Her mother brought out a third slate and a third basket, and placed them to the left of the slate for tens.
"This is the slate for hundreds," she said.
The little girl wrote 1 on the slate for hundreds, 0 on the slate for tens, and 0 on the slate for ones. 1 0 0. One hundred.
That evening, the whole house was filled with cosmos flowers.
Teacher notes for Part One
Part One took us about four weeks, with the story told in small pieces and a great deal of practice woven between the tellings. Let the story move slowly. The children should be counting, bundling and writing for many days before the next scene arrives.
Objectives
Count confidently past nine, first aloud and with the body, then with objects
Experience ten as a new unit: ten single things become one bundle
Understand that the position of a digit tells us what it counts
Understand zero as "nothing in this place"
Read and write numbers to 99, and meet 100 as ten bundles of ten
Working with real things first
Before any drawing, let the children bundle. Flowers, twigs, matchsticks or stalks tied with thread or grass all work well. Use two or three real slates or small boards, laid side by side from right to left: ones, tens, hundreds. The child adds one object at a time, wipes and rewrites the ones slate, and feels the moment of bundling at ten. Repeat this many times. The moment when the 9 is wiped and becomes 0 while a 1 appears on the tens slate is the heart of the whole story.
Morning work inside our circle at home: main lesson books, block crayons, a few flowers, and slates for writing the numbers.
Practice in drawing
We drew columns in our books and drew flowers into them. The child counts the bundles, counts the single flowers, and writes the number in the last column.
Bundles and flowers to draw
343 bundles of ten and 4 single flowers
505 bundles of ten and 0 single flowers
70 bundles of ten and 7 single flowers
999 bundles of ten and 9 single flowers
Then reverse it. Give the child a number, and let them draw the bundles and flowers that make it. Later, add a hundreds column for the big bunches.
Part Two: The Squirrels' Tree
Again, to be told over several mornings, with practice in between.
Mornings in the woods
The little girl loved the early mornings best of all. Before she sat down to her lessons with her mother, she had a little time that was all her own. She would run through the wet grass of the meadow, all the way to its far edge, where the woods began.
In the woods it was cool and shady. Birds sang high up in the branches, and squirrels scurried up and down the trunks with their tails held high. Sometimes she lay down under a tree and took a little nap with the leaves rustling above her. And always she collected things: nuts, seed pods of every shape, and stones. She found shiny glittering ones, red ones, yellow ones and white ones that looked like crystals. Her pockets were always full when she came home.
The tree with the lines
One morning, she wandered a little deeper into the woods than before. There she saw a huge old tree that she had never noticed. Its trunk was so wide that she could not have put her arms around it, and high up in the trunk was a big round hollow.
At the foot of the tree sat a squirrel. Beside him was a great pile of nuts, and in his paw he held a sharp little stone. He was scratching lines into the bark.
The little girl crept closer and watched.
Every time the squirrel scratched a line, another squirrel took one nut from the pile, scampered up the trunk and dropped it into the hollow. Scratch, one nut. Scratch, another nut. Scratch, scratch.
"They are storing their nuts," she whispered to herself. "And he is keeping count!"
She watched more carefully. The squirrel scratched one line, two lines, three lines, four lines, standing side by side. When the fifth nut went up the tree, he did not scratch a fifth line next to the others. He scratched one long line straight across the four, like a little gate. Then he started a new group of four, and again a line across for the fifth.
"He is counting in fives," thought the little girl. The bark was covered with little gates, row after row after row.
After a while she could not hold her curiosity any longer. "Excuse me," she said. "What are you doing?"
"Shh!" said the squirrel without looking up. "Don't disturb me. I'll lose my count!"
So the little girl sat down on a root and waited. She watched the squirrels work all through the morning. The pile of nuts grew smaller, the hollow grew fuller, and the bark grew more and more crowded with lines.
At last she said, as gently as she could, "I think what you are doing is very hard. I know a way that could make it easier for you."
The squirrel stopped. He put down his stone and turned around. In truth, he knew very well that his job was hard. His eyes were tired from counting lines, and he was always afraid of making a mistake. If there was an easier way, he wanted to hear it.
Grandpa Squirrel
"You see," said the squirrel, "our whole family lives in this tree, and we keep all our nuts in the hollow. Every one of us has a job. Some gather nuts, some carry them up, and I keep the count. And every evening, Grandpa Squirrel comes out and asks, How many nuts do we have? He is very strict. We must tell him exactly. We gather nuts all day, and we eat nuts all day too, so the number keeps changing. If we get it wrong, oh, he is not pleased!"
The little girl nodded. Now she understood the problem.
Fingers and toes
"My mother taught me to count," she said. "Look, I have ten fingers." She held up her hands. "Show me yours."
The squirrel held up his little front paws. The little girl counted. "Four on this paw, and four on that one. Oh dear, you have only eight fingers!"
The squirrel looked very sad. But then the little girl looked down. "But look at your feet! Five toes on each. You have ten toes! You can count on your toes."
So the squirrel sat up and wiggled his toes, and the little girl taught him to count. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine... ten!" Then she found a flat stone and showed him how to write the shapes from 1 to 9, and how to write ten as 1 and 0.
"Let us make this our project," she said. "I will help you set it all up."
Pause here
The rooms in the hollow
The next morning the little girl came back with her pockets full of twigs and long leaves, and a ball of coir string from home. She climbed up to the hollow and began to build.
With twigs and leaves she divided the hollow into little rooms, side by side, just like her mother's slates and her flower baskets.
In the right hand corner she made the first room. "This is the room for single nuts," she said. "Here we keep loose nuts, one by one. But only up to nine!"
To its left she made the second room. "This is the room for strings of ten."
To the left of that, the third room. "This is the room for squares of a hundred."
And to the left of that, a fourth room, the biggest of all. "And this is for blocks of a thousand."
The hollow divided into rooms by twigs and vines, with the squirrels at work and the girl among them. On the same board, the children sorted dot patterns into odd and even.
The room managers
Then she gave every room a manager, and every manager had one job.
The manager of the single nuts room could keep up to nine nuts. "The moment the tenth nut arrives," said the little girl, "you take the coir and string all ten nuts together. Then you pass the string to the next room."
The manager of the strings room could keep up to nine strings. "The moment the tenth string arrives, you lay all ten strings side by side and tie them together. Now they make a square. A square of a hundred nuts! Pass it to the next room."
The manager of the squares room could keep up to nine squares. "The moment the tenth square arrives, you stack all ten squares one on top of the other. Now they make a block. A block of a thousand nuts! Pass it to the next room."
The squirrels looked at each other. It was so simple! Nobody had to count past nine ever again. Each manager only had to watch for the tenth.
The girl hands a new string of ten to the next room. Squares of a hundred on the left, strings of ten in the middle, single nuts on the right.
Then the little girl showed them one more thing. Next to each room, on the bark, she made a small smooth patch. "Each manager writes here how many are in his room. Only one number, from 0 to 9." And when they looked at all the numbers together, from left to right, they could read the whole count at once.
That evening, Grandpa Squirrel came out and asked his question. The squirrels simply read the numbers off the bark, and they were right. Grandpa Squirrel was so pleased that he sat still for a long, long time, just looking at the rooms.
What the girl learned
And the little girl learned something too. On her way home, she thought about the squirrel's little gates of five. She tried counting her pebbles that way, four lines and a line across. It was a clever way to count, she thought. She liked it very much. But for big numbers, counting in tens was easier.
Teacher notes for Part Two
Part Two takes the children from bundles they can hold to a whole system of rooms, and lets them imagine numbers far larger than anything they could count.
Objectives
Meet a second way of grouping (fives) and compare it with tens
Understand that each place holds only up to nine, and passes on the tenth
Experience ones, tens, hundreds and thousands as line, square and block
Build a felt picture of very large numbers, using the Indian names lakh and crore
Counting in fives
We spent good time with the squirrel's tally marks. The children scratched and drew "little gates" of five, counted rows of them, and chanted 5, 10, 15, 20 as they went. This became our five times table. Children enjoy the discovery that two gates of five make one string of ten.
Counting in fives with the squirrel’s little gates, all the way to 100, drawn beneath the great tree.
The bead material
The idea of strings, squares and blocks came to me from the Montessori golden bead material. A single bead is one. Ten beads on a wire make a line of ten. Ten lines side by side make a square of a hundred. Ten squares stacked make a cube of a thousand.
We made our own. We bought wire and wooden beads, and the children threaded strings of ten, then bound ten strings into squares, and finally built one cube of a thousand together. Making them by hand is slow, and that slowness is exactly the point: the children feel how many a thousand really is.
Our handmade beads on the three slates: six squares, nine strings and nine single beads. Six hundred and ninety nine. One more bead, and every room would have to pass something on.
Imagining beyond a thousand
We made only one cube. After that, because the children wanted to and were ready, we went on in imagination.
A cube: 10 squares stacked - 1,000 (one thousand)
A tower: 10 cubes stacked - 10,000 (ten thousand)
A wall: 10 towers side by side - 1,00,000 (one lakh)
A great block: 10 walls together - 10,00,000 (ten lakh)
A building: 10 blocks stacked - 1,00,00,000 (one crore)
Notice that the shapes repeat: line, square, cube, then tower (a long line of cubes), wall (a square face), great block. Children often sense this rhythm on their own. We did a little of this in Grade 2 and left it there, then picked it up again every year so that large numbers stay meaningful, visual and quantitative.
Practice in drawing: the tree hollow
Draw the hollow as a table of rooms. Draw single nuts in the ones room, strings of ten in the tens room and squares of a hundred in the hundreds room. The children count each room and write the number in the last column on the right.
The hollow became a table on the board: hundreds, tens, ones, and the number. Here the rows read 343, 270, 109, 906 and 50, while the main lesson book on the floor holds the same work.
More rooms to draw and read
Then reverse it, as in Part One: give a number and let the children draw the hollow.
[Teacher aside: Tree squirrels do have four clear digits on each front paw (with a tiny vestigial thumb) and five toes on each hind foot, so the fingers and toes detail holds up well if a child asks. Worth a quick check against a natural history source if you want to show pictures.]
Part Three: Gathering and Eating
The story now becomes the ground for addition and subtraction. Each scene can be told on its own day and then worked through with beads, then drawings, then numbers.
A good day of gathering
The little girl came back to the tree often, and the squirrels were always happy to see her.
One evening, the managers' numbers on the bark read 5 6 3. Five squares, six strings and three single nuts. Five hundred and sixty three nuts.
Just then the gatherers came home from a good day in the woods. They had brought 7 strings of ten and 4 single nuts, seventy four more.
"Where do they go?" asked a little squirrel.
"Always start with the single nuts," said the little girl.
So the four single nuts went into the single nuts room. There were three already. Three and four make seven. Seven is less than ten, so the manager kept them all and wrote 7.
Then the seven strings went into the strings room. There were six already. Six and seven make thirteen! The manager counted ten strings, laid them side by side and tied them into a square, just as he had been taught. He passed the new square to the squares room. Three strings were left, so he wrote 3.
The squares room had five squares, and now one more had arrived. Six squares. The manager wrote 6.
The bark now read 6 3 7. Six hundred and thirty seven.
That evening, Grandpa Squirrel asked his question, and the answer came at once.
A day of eating
The next day it rained, and nobody went out to gather. The squirrels stayed snug in the tree and ate from their store.
On another evening, the bark read 7 4 5. That day the family had eaten 3 strings and 4 single nuts, thirty four nuts in all.
"Start with the single nuts," said the little girl again.
The single nuts room had five nuts. The squirrels ate four. One was left. The manager wrote 1.
The strings room had four strings. The squirrels ate three strings. One was left. The manager wrote 1.
Nobody had touched the squares. Still seven.
The bark now read 7 1 1. Seven hundred and eleven.
When there are not enough
Then came a very hungry day. Again the bark read 7 4 5. And this time the squirrels wanted to eat 5 strings and 6 single nuts, fifty six nuts.
They ran first to the single nuts room. But there were only five nuts there, and they wanted six!
"Oh no," said the manager. "Not enough!"
"Don't worry," said the little girl. "Go next door."
So the manager went to the strings room and borrowed one string. Now the strings room had three strings instead of four. He carried the string back, untied the coir, and let the ten nuts roll out. Ten nuts and the five already there made fifteen. Now the squirrels could eat six. Fifteen take away six leaves nine. The manager wrote 9.
Next they went to the strings room. There were only three strings left now, and they wanted five!
"Go next door again," said the little girl.
So the strings manager went to the squares room and borrowed one square. Now there were six squares instead of seven. He untied the square, and out came ten strings. Ten strings and three strings made thirteen. The squirrels took five. Thirteen take away five leaves eight. The manager wrote 8.
The squares room now had six squares, and nobody wanted to eat a whole square. The manager wrote 6.
The bark now read 6 8 9. Six hundred and eighty nine.
Grandpa Squirrel looked at the numbers, then at the rooms, then at the little girl. He nodded slowly. And from that day on, the squirrels never lost their count again.
Teacher notes for Part Three
Every operation was learned three times over: first with the beads in our hands, then in drawings of the tree hollow, and only then in written numbers. Do not hurry from one stage to the next.
Objectives
Add by place, always beginning with the single nuts
Understand carrying as "ten in one room becomes one in the next"
Subtract by place, first without needing to open a string
Understand borrowing as "open one from the room next door"
The three stages
1. Beads. Lay out the first number in rooms on the table. Bring the second number in beads. Combine room by room from the right, tying up any ten. For subtraction, take away room by room, untying a string or square when a room runs short.
2. Drawing. Draw the hollow as a table. Draw the nuts, strings and squares for both numbers, then draw what happens: the new square passed left, or the string opened and its ten nuts spilled into the ones room.
3. Numbers. Write the numbers in rooms, one above the other, and work from the right. The little carried 1 is the new string or square being passed next door.
Practice, in the order we met it
Gathering (adding)
476: 324 + 152 · nothing to tie
637: 563 + 74 · one room spills over
423: 278 + 145 · two rooms spill over
845: 456 + 389 · two rooms spill over
Eating (subtracting)
711: 745 − 34 · nothing to open
343: 586 − 243 · nothing to open
689: 745 − 56 · open strings and squares
354: 532 − 178 · open strings and squares
275: 400 − 125 · the empty room
The last kind deserves its own story day. When the squirrels want single nuts but both the nuts room and the strings room are empty, the strings manager must first open a square to get ten strings, then pass one string over to be opened into nuts. Children love working this out with real beads.
Rhythm, materials and a closing note
Suggested rhythm
About 2 weeks, as we did it Part One: the meadow Counting past nine, bundles, slates, writing to 100
About 2 weeks Part Two: the tree Tally fives, rooms in the hollow, bead strings, squares and cube, imagining to a crore
About 4 weeks Part Three: gathering and eating Addition and subtraction through beads, drawings, numbers
A good daily shape: tell the next small piece of story, work with real objects, then draw or write in the book. Recall the previous day's story at the start of each lesson, and let the children retell it.
Materials
Flowers, twigs or stalks, and grass or thread for bundling
Two or three small slates or boards, and chalk
Baskets or bowls for ones, tens and hundreds
Wire and wooden beads for strings of ten, squares of a hundred and one cube of a thousand
Nuts or pebbles for the tree hollow work
Main lesson books, block crayons and coloured pencils
A closing note
This story grew from two boys at my home during the pandemic, and it has since met children who came to mathematics later and began fresh. In each case, numbers turned into flowers, nuts and rooms the children could see and hold. Please change the names, the flowers and the woods to suit your own children and your own land. The structure underneath will hold.
The story does not end with subtraction. Multiplication and division can grow from the very same tree, the same rooms and the same family of squirrels, so the children never have to leave a world they already know and love. And the meadow kept giving. Years later, in Grade 5, I returned to it once more. This time the girl's father, the woodcutter, led the way, and as he cut his logs into smaller and smaller pieces, the children met decimal fractions.
The gatherer squirrels and the hungry squirrels also became our daily mental maths. There are 10 nuts, and the hungry squirrels eat 2. How many are left? Now there are 20, and they eat 2. Then 30, then 40, then 50, and then 100. Through these number bonds, the children learned to take away tens and ones in their heads, and to add them back just as easily, because they could always picture the nuts in their rooms.
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