This is a concept I'm working on for Cole right now with money. I glued one penny to one index card and wrote penny and 1 and 1 cent on it. Glued 5 cards together for a nickel...10 for a dime....and 25 for a quarter. The index card stacks are thicker for each higher value coin. Am trying to do equivalents with 25 cards and 25 pennies, but those suckers are hard to stick!
I wanted to use wooden nickels, initially, since they'd get nice and thick but couldn't find any. Any sort of multi-sensory approach works well with Cole. He learned the alphabet and numerals from touching all the neighbors cars' license plates before he could walk...I'd take him out for a "crawl" and then wash his hands REALLY well.
For simple counting (not rote - that's no trouble) we used colored index cards and stickers/light objects to get to 50...its easy to do this for 1-10, but higher is hard to do.
1-10 cards are pink with the numeral 1 and word ONE, plus one green feather glued on...2(two) has two small buttons glued on..3 is 3 sticks of spaghetti
11-20 cards are green, and I used different types of stickers; 21-30 are blue; and so forth.
I love the block idea!
Another idea i wanted to remember - a speaker recommended teaching counting with different lengths of blocks so that the abstract concept of a number becomes more clear, especially for adding & subtracting and such. The photo he showed were just plain blocks of different lengths to represent each number, I found these with fruit images on them on Amazon but they appear to be the same thing. FYI. :)