For some reason my daughter is happy doubling her numbers but freezes up if I ask her what half of a number is.  She seems to have missed the link between the two so I wanted to do and activity with her to help re-enforce it.

She loves butterflies and knows that the butterflies two wings match so I thought it would be a good idea to use this concept.  I downloaded this butterfly template from Activity Village (part of their membership pages).  I asked her to pick a number, she started with 7.  I got her to write 7 on the top of the first wing and then make 7 dots below it.  Then I reminded her that the two wings needed to be the same so she wrote the 7 and drew the 7 dots on the other wing.  Then I asked her what the 7+7 would make and she wrote the 14 on the body of the butterfly

I then asked her what would happen if she halved the butterfly or divided it is two, so she folded her butterfly.

And she naturally answered that half of 14 would be 7.

We continued trying this with a few other numbers

Very simple yet writing the numbers on the two wings and then folding the butterfly in half seemed to help her.

Of course little brother joined in.  He practiced writing some of his numbers on a couple of the butterflies.  We have not done lots of writing with him so I was blown away at how well he is forming his numbers.

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It was a really simple activity using the Butterfly template but one which seemed to help explain the concept. She got that the two halves together double a number and when she folded the butterfly in half it just clicked that doubling and halving were opposites.