Happy Holidays!
The holiday season offers a magical opportunity for kindergarteners to learn counting festively. Integrating learning into holiday-themed activities is how the Kinder Bunnies add a little extra fun to their day. We have two of our favorite holiday books perfect for this time of the year.
We drew our own sleds for this math activity and read a book called "Ten on the Sled" by Kim Norman. The Kinder Bunnies loved the animals on the sled, teaching them to count backward in a fun winter setting. We used this story to graph the story characters, along with using our sled drawings as a math mat.
Instead of animals on our sleds, we used clipart pictures of toys, gifts, and candy to make up our addition and subtraction stories.
We created glitter snowflake art and used pom-poms to continue our addition and subtraction stories with "Ten Sparkly Snowflakes by Tiger Tales. The Kinder Bunnies loved using glitter glue to make their math mats pop. We'll save them and use them again after the new year for more winter fun. They also liked counting backward again with forest animals. We compared and contrasted the two stories during our reading block.
One of our families donated a math activity that helped us practice counting and decorating. The felt trees were used with dice, one or more depending on "the challenge." Each Bunny would roll and decorate their tree, snowman, or gingerbread man with holiday decorations.* The smaller trees used beads for decorations.
We liked the activity so much that we created our own trees and then graphed the stickers on each tree. We knew there had to be a book to support our tree theme, and we found 1"0 Trim-the-Tree'ers" by Janet Schulman.
Counting can be part of many holiday activities, from baking and decorating to making art. These activities help reinforce number skills enjoyably.
Counting the Joys of the Season!
