Mathematics: Preschool Playground

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Is math necessary? Only if you want to be able to buy, sell, cook, navigate, plan for the future, leave a tip, live frugally, handle home repair, calculate material yardage, know how much carpet you need or whether the couch will fit along the wall, play a board game, take a trip, or do almost anything else. In short, the answer is YES! Whether you need to teach first grade math or high school trigonometry, SchoolhouseTeachers.com has math courses for you. They even have courses to help you teach math such as Finally Conquer Fractions, Hands-On Math Help with Cuisenaire Rods, and How to Teach Elementary Math. Bring some fun into math—for you and your student!

Both my four year old and two year old know their numbers from 1 to 20 and even beyond that to some extant.  My four year old will even sit at the table and 'do math' by creating his own addition worksheets.  Just the other night my two year old daughter surprised me by counting to 20 with only one or two corrections.

As my two littles know their shapes, I decided we would work on lessons from Preschool Playground: Numbers, Patterns, and Cognitive Skills this week in addition to some other activities that we will be doing for the fall.  This way he would practice on his writing skills and my daughter could join in for some fun crafts I added to the lessons.

On Monday, my four year old practiced writing his number one while my daughter played with the Sesame Street pictures I cut out for our second activity.

Worksheets from Preschool Playground

I wrote the number one numerically as "1" and as "one" on the paper along with the name of the character.  I used old wrapping paper for the pictures of the characters which meant that there was an uneven number available.  Surprisingly neither my son nor my daughter were upset that their pictures were different.

We counted out 1 Elmo, 1 Cookie Monster, 1 Big Bird, and so on as we worked.  I then let them draw or color on the paper as they saw fit.

The next day we completed a counting exercise using some Dollar Store erasers and plastic mice.  I created the counting board for a bow activity and we have used it several times for counting Thomas Trains, cars, and milk caps.

My daughter helped count out the smaller numbers. My son did some simple addition and subtraction to figure out how many erasers or mice we need to take from the lower numbers for the numbers in the second row.

This counting activity can be done again with fake leaves, acorns, turkey-shaped erasers, Christmas themed erasers, bows, snowflakes, foam hearts, etc.

On Wednesday, my son and I worked on practicing writing the number two while my daughter drew happy, sad, and angry faces on pumpkins.

Preschool Playground has many ideas including suggestions for using chalk, noodles, pretzels, yarn, shaving cream to learn numbers as well as a variety of worksheets that teach the writing of the numbers, reading clocks and calendars, and positional words.

Even if you are not teaching a preschooler, there are many math lessons at SchoolhouseTeachers.com for you and your child.  If you are teaching an elementary student, they could take Fraction Workshop or Stretching Higher with Third Grade Math. For older students, they also offer such courses as Geometry and Statistics.

Reusing Christmas Bows - A Counting Activity

A couple of months ago I saw a post to create a counting activity using ghosts. At the time I thought it was a cute idea and something to do another year. But then I saw a similar activity using bows (Christmas Bow Counting Activity) and I thought now is the time to make it. 

While drawing the numbers of the poster board, I learned how important it is when doing any project for a toddler, who is sitting next to you, to not leave writing utensils in that toddler's reach. But I just have to laugh it off because the project is for him so who cares if it looks perfect as long as he's happy to play with it and can enjoy it and learn from it. 

I deliberated on what materials to use for this project for a while. Should I use poster board and have one big piece with the bows to put on to it? Or should I use card stock with smaller, individual pieces for him to put the bows on? I finally decided on using a piece of poster board putting the numbers at the top and the bottom and then allowing him to count out the bows on to it. This way we can use it for other holidays and can count out different objects like hearts for Valentine's Day, ghosts for Halloween or four leaf clovers for St Patrick's Day. 

I used numbers from an alphabet set purchased at the dollar store and traced them onto the poster board instead of gluing them to allow for extra creativity. I let my toddler pick out which color each number was going to be on the board. So even though it doesn't look perfect, since I was tracing the numbers and coloring them in, it is created with love. 

Looking for more fun math ideas?