What does math look like in preschool? In my classroom, most of the time it looks like playing games. Games are such a great way for children to learn early math skills. The best part of the activities I'm blogging about is that they were having so much fun, they didn't even realize how many skills they were working on!
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Yesterday was game day in my classroom. Experience Early Learning has done a great job incorporating so many fun learning activities into our theme this month, Garden Treasures. This week we have been learning about garden visitors - animals of all sizes that we may see in our garden. During our Crow lesson we learned that crows are noisy, eat almost anything, and that they are smart. Crows can pick up twigs to use as tools to find food. This led into our Feed the Crow activity.
With this activity we received a Feed the Crow game for each child. They first had to use their scissor skills to cut apart the pieces of the game. After cutting out the pieces they mixed their cards up and flipped them over. If they flipped a food card over they got to flip another card. If they flipped over the scarecrow card that meant the game was over. This is where the early math skills come in - they had to count the number of food cards flipped before they had found the scarecrow. They played this a few times, each time trying to beat the number they got before.
Some things to observe with this game: Were they able to follow the dotted lines while cutting out their game pieces? Did they create two piles of cards (flipped and unflipped)? Did the child understand the concept of flipping over the cards to find the food for the crow? Were they able to count the cards?
Another fun math game we played during our Crow topic was called Crow Tools. We learned that crows not only can use a twig as a tool to find food but they also use their beaks. I laid out our rabbit counters, a die, a spoon, fork, and a pair of tweezers. The fork, spoon, and the tweezers were our tools for this game. This game touched on the following skills: Technology (SCI 4), Fine Motor (PD 2), and Number Sense (MR 1).
We took turns rolling the die and identifying the number. After they identified the number rolled they got to choose a tool they wanted to pick the rabbits up with. They pretended they were a crow while picking up the same amount of rabbits as the number rolled. Our rabbit counters came in our Experience Preschool box this month and the children have really enjoyed using them for various activities - both during structured learning time and free play!
We talked about which tool was easier to use, with the tweezers being the favored tool.
A huge shout out to Experience Early Learning for providing such fun learning opportunities for my preschoolers! Follow us along as we wrap up our Garden Treasures unit next week.
