Play Dough Number Fun

Play dough is such a great learning resource.  There are so many great things that we can do with it.

Here we are making numbers and showing sets up to ten.  I laminated some sheets that I found  (a LONG time ago) on a website called childcareland.com, a really GREAT site with lots of ideas)

Skills

• reading numbers
• counting sets of objects
• making sets
• rolling play dough 'snakes'
• rolling play dough 'balls'
• using fine motor skills and developing hand muscles strength

Angry Birds and Simple Machines

My students are crazy about the game Angry Birds so we had some fun experimenting with catapults.  With a little adult help they had a blast flinging their 'birds' around the room.

Handwriting Without Tears - Mat Man Fun

The preschool I work at uses Handwriting Without Tears, it is a great program that supports early handwriting and fine motor skills.  Here are some of the ideas my children come up with when playing and exploring with the wood pieces and geometric shapes.

This is the official Handwriting Without Tears website.

Counting Fun

We practiced our counting and fine motor skills by threading beads onto pipe cleaners.

Equipment

• 20 pipe cleaners
• numbers 1-20 on small pieced of card stock (taped to pipe cleaners)
• small beads such as pony beads

Skills

• reading numbers 1-20
• counting objects to 20 with cardinality
• threading
• sorting by color
• making simple patterns

Dice Games - Simple Addition

Dice are so much fun to play with, especially when you get to toss them and count their totals.  That's what we did with this simple yet fun game.  Just roll the dice, count the total and place a counter on the corresponding number.

Equipment

• 2 dice
• game sheets (with the numbers 2-12)
• counters

Skills

• subitizing (knowing how many in a group without counting)
• counting
• addition
• reading numbers 2-12
• taking turns

Counting Fun with Pom Poms

We had lots of fun counting and sorting pom poms. The children used tweezers to pick up and sort pom poms into bowls.  Each bowl had a number and the children filled the bowls with the corresponding numbers. The children checked in with me to make sure they had counted correctly.

Equipment

• 20 paper bowls (numbers 1-20 written on them)
• plastic tweezers or tongs
• pom poms

Skills

• reading numbers 1-20
• counting objects up to 20 with  1 to 1 correspondence
• using tweezers
• sorting by color and or size

Dice Games - Build a City 2

This week we extended on our original build a city game.  Instead of using just on dice, we used two and practiced our addition skills.  We also used smaller blocks to work on fine motor and building skills.  The children love doing 'big kid math'.