Math Fun: Counting, Adding and Playing with Numbers

We've had lots of fun finding creative ways to approach math concepts such as counting, sorting, sequencing and even addition and I thought I'd share a few of those ideas.

The top picture show Adventure-man sorting his dinosaurs by colour using a pair of Thomas the Tank Engine trainer chopsticks.  They are really fun to use and great for enhancing motor-skills.

He worked on putting numbers 1-20 in sequence. We got this cute caterpillar to go with our Letter C theme from Confessions of a Homeschooler. She has a bunch of great resources like a Caterpillar dice game which Adventure-man loved, as well as a number of other sorting, counting and matching printables around the same theme.

We played a lot of grid games which he really enjoys at the moment. Prekinders has a nice selection of them to print off in different themes. The game simply requires us to take turns throwing a die, identifying the number and then placing the correct number of tokens (like beads, nuts, buttons etc) on the squares in the grid. One token per square. The first person to cover their board wins.

This was our favourite of the week - a math game called Add-it! created by Erica at Confessions of a Homeschooler (she's amazing!). It was a really fun adding game which Adventure-man seemed really ready to do. We used Dinosaurs and other fun manipulatives and just added them up. We played against each other - collecting number cards to see who could get the most. He particularly enjoyed it when he poached cards from me. So much fun! Download from Erica here.

We reviewed our shapes in various ways which included playing "Perfection" (I had him name the shapes as we went along). He also enjoyed a shape matching file folder games (here's a good one) and we just built with blocks and our Magformers.



Other number activities this week: I drew numbers outside on our patio and Adventure-man threw beanbags onto the numbers as I called them out. We also played hopscotch. And we practiced our counting to 20 as we threw a ball/beanbag/balloon back and forth.

We also practiced our number writing with these cute rhymes from Hubbards Cupboard. We used the whiteboard (most popular), flour, shaving cream (strangely not so popular - go figure!) and traced the numbers with crayons.

Here are some links to some other fun math printables for preschoolers:
Homeschool Creations
TLSbooks
Shirley's Preschool