Math Activities for your Pre-Schooler or Kindergartener
Dollar Tree is truly one of my favorite resources for homeschool supplies, homeschooling doesn’t need to be an expensive endeavor. A little creativity, a couple dollars, maybe a quick peek at Pinterest if you get stuck and you will have a desk full of fun math activities to give your little student a break from boring old worksheets.
Write numbers 1-20 on the end of popsicle sticks, on a another set make the same amount of dots on each, use 3 more to write a plus sign, a minus sign, and an equals sign. You can use them in so many ways to teach various math skills.
Have your child place them in order, after they are placed in order remove random sticks and have your child tell you which number is missing.
Have your child match the number with the equal number of dots.
Use them for addition or subtraction, pull 2 numbers, and the desired math symbols lay out a math problem and have your child solve it.
Remove odd or even numbers and have your child practice skip counting by placing them in order.
Have your child place them backwards from 10-1.
The activities can also be done with flashcards, smooth stones, silk leaves, lego’s, clothespins, and plastic spoons.
Counters or manipulatives for math:
You can use unifix cubes. We have a set of those but I also have an entire box of different counters ive collected to keep it interesting and to go with a variety of themes. From the Dollar Tree I purchased; rubber bugs, frogs and snakes, smooth pebbles, little candies, round little jewels, erasers, small paper cups, pom poms, and blank foam dice. There are also a lot of things you can buy seasonally. I have also picked things up from thrift stores, yard sales, or around the house to use such as; wine corks, seashells, golf tee’s, plastic fish tank decorations, bottle caps, and hot wheels cars. You can use these for one to one correspondence, addition and subtraction, more than, less than problems, weighing, skip counting, measuring, etc..
We also have an abacus. it is a fun and totally different tool for learning numbers, so it makes it interesting to them. My kinder loves to use this for simple math problems when he is doing math worksheets.
Paper Money- Again this is available at Dollar Tree, this is a tool that can be used to identify money, how many coins does it take to make a dollar or other coin. A great early math skill to teach.
Paper or plastic clock- we started with learning O’clock, he picked that up very quickly, we are moving on to quarter after, and will then move to thiry and quarter till when he has mastered that. Randomly throughout the day I will have him show me on our real clock different times, we also talk about approximately what time we do things so he is grasping more about the meaning of time.
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