This is the perfect time of year to head out into your neighborhood and look for things to count. The weather is great for walking around, camera in hand, with a seeker of things to take pictures of by your side.
I helped my son decide to limit the things were looking for to flowers before we left the house. There are so many wonderful things you mind on a walk and narrowing what we were looking for seemed like it would help us accomplish the task and not end up an odd assortment of pictures. Although an odd assortment is perfectly fine to search for when you are looking for things to count.
Once we were out and about my son seemed to find flowers everywhere. He was really excited about finding clover in almost everyone's yard. After a few clover pictures, I decided his hunt needed to be focused on finding flowers that were not clover.
Then his focus turned to dandelions. We had a short discussion about the difference between the flowers that appear on weeds and flowers you plant. He informed me his yard will be filled with weed flowers when he grows up.
After gathering a number of pictures of various flowers around our neighborhood, we headed home to print them out.
The printed pictures of flowers were later placed in plastic covers and put on a table along a black magic marker and counting pebbles.
We counted flowers in three different ways:
1. My son placed a counter over each flower and we counted them as he removed a counter from each flower.
2. My son counted the flowers in each picture as he circled them with the black marker.
3. My son pointed to each flower and counted as he counted I wrote the number of the flower on the flower.
What are some others ways we could have counted?
Counters could have been placed on each flower and then the counters could have been slid down to a number line to find out how many flowers there were.
Tally marks could have been placed on a piece of paper as we counted.
I hope you have fun exploring your neighborhood for things you can count.
Young learners may enjoy collecting objects they can manipulate and feel from around the neighborhood. Once they have had some counting experiences with concrete objects they will be ready for counting semi-concrete objects like the flowers in our pictures.
You can count on more math fun with these other Quirky Momma posts:
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