understanding zero

When Daivik was learning numbers, we were employing couple of tricks. Our favorite was to imagine our fingers as various objects and count them.  One day he held out his five fingers and said, ‘look, I have ice creams…1..2..3..4..5’. I told, ‘okay, now give me one’ and closed one of his fingers. I then asked, ‘now how many ice creams do you have’. He counted, and said ‘four’. In this way I kept ‘eating’ his icecreams until only one remained. I said, ‘okay, I will take this icecream also', and closed his last finger. 'Tell me, how many ice creams do you have now'. For a long moment he kept staring at the empty space that was previously occupied by his finger. Suddenly he got excited. 'Appa', he exclaimed, 'if you take away the last icecream, nothing remains'. To emphasise this, he pointed to the recently emptied space (using the other hand!) and said, 'look here, there is no ice cream'.

At this point he realized that there were no more ‘ice creams’ and started crying that I ate them all!