Seasonal Math Activity with Stickers

Yesterday Ty asked to do more of the "putting stickers in circles" work that I posted about last week (you can see it on the wall in several of these photos). Sure! I just had to figure out how to do it a little differently... What I ended up creating was an easy activity that works on 1:1 correspondence, counting, fine motor skills and a bit of addition recognition.

I cut two strips of orange paper and traced five circles onto each. One strip at a time, Tyler placed one Halloween sticker in each circle, counting as he went.

We then put the two strips in a line and counted, left to right, to ten. I noted out loud that we had one strip of five stickers and another strip of five stickers and that when we put them together we had ten!

Then Ty wanted to do "more!" Not in my plans, at he really only counts objects up to ten or so, but I went with it and made him two more strips. He happily worked at placing stickers and counting 1-5 on each. When we were done with the third strip we put them together and counted to fifteen. After the last we made counted them all to twenty. He can rote count to 19 but gets a bit wacky with his item counting after a while, touching stickers out of order and getting silly, but this was expected.

I wasn't planning to write the numbers under each as he's only learning 1-3 with quantity right now, but I had a feeling he'd be into it so I asked if he wanted me to write the numbers. I received a very enthusiastic "Yeah!", wrote numbers 1-20, counting as I went. As you can see from the pictures, he thought this was really neat. He enjoys watching me write words as well, especially if I sound them out.

We have a big blank space on the wall in our hallway right now, so it was the perfect place to hang his line of stuckers this morning!. I purposely kept space between each set of five. He gets excited each time he passes by and sees it; he can't help but to stop and count them!  

Linking-up with Carisa's Tot School!