Christmas Tree Numeracy Fun!

A few weeks ago at halloween (wow seems like a long time ago!) Seb really enjoyed the pumpkin number activity that I made for him. With that in mind I wanted to create a number activity for him. I an idea on Rockabye Butterfly for decorating trees with the correct number of pop poms and it grew from there.

Using some foam sheets I had I cut out a Chritmas tree. I then cut out 11 stars from yellow foam (0-10) and wrote the numbers using a sharpie. If you don’t have foam you could just use paper or card and maybe aminate it depending how long you want it to last!

As Seb is enjoying writing at the moment I wanted to make an extension activity for the exercise which is available as a free PDF.

Seb started lining the stars out in the correct order.

He laid them all out to 10 with a little bit of support!

Seb rolled the dice and reconised the number 2 – he found the star with the number 2 and placed it on the top of the tree.

He then matched the pom poms to the number. It was at this point I realised that the extension would be really good for him but I couldn’t make it fast enough for him to remain intereted!! It’s now on a tray waiting for him to choose it again!

Now Freya chose it off the shelf!

I know that Freya would have happily done the exercise as it was set up for Seb. But I suddenly realised it could be set up as an addition exercise for her. I quickly got her to cut another tree out of the foam while I adapted the extension so that it included a stage 1 addition sum card.

So for Freya’s activity she rolls the dice and puts the correct star and pom poms on the first tree. She then rolls the dice for a second time and does the same on the seond tree.

Now she can record the sum on the tree. Freya has been using sum cards so knows how they work.

After a while she no longer used the materials and just made the sums up her self – I was so pleased that she felt confident enough to do this.

I have also made a subtraction sheet. I haven’t introduced subtraction to Freya yet so will do this at a later time but hopefully it might be useful to you.

As always I hope you enjoy this post, if you have any questions or feedback please email me info@montessorisoul.com.

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