Math Play: Kid-Made Counting Books

I realized recently that a lot of the crafts and activities we’ve been doing have been geared towards my 5-year-old.

I realized that I needed to focus more on my 3-year-old with some of our activities.

My girls are at a point where their skills, interests, and educational needs are vastly different.

In light of this, I’ve made a goal to have a craft or activity each day that is geared towards each child’s levels, therefore, at least two things a day.

I’ll admit it’s a lofty goal and won’t always be achievable, but it has made me much more aware of the need to go back to learning some of the more basic ideas. Counting is one of those ideas.

We’ve checked out a fun variety of counting books from the library, we’ve gone on a counting walk, and we also made these fun counting books.

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I was inspired by the pretty counting books on Living Montessori Now. I pinned it as soon as I saw it, knowing that I wanted the girls to make them someday. Deb provides a free printable if you don’t want to make your own pages. Our printer was completely out of ink, so we just made our own pages.

Supplies needed:

Construction paper
White paper
Scissors
Variety of stickers
Markers/crayons
Hole-punch
Yarn/ribbon/string

Our booklets were the size of a quarter sheet of paper.

I pre-cut all of the pieces of paper.

Each girl had 10 white pieces and 2 pieces of construction paper for the front and back covers.

On each sheet of paper, I drew a circle in the bottom corner for the girls to write their numbers. I had them write each number from 1 – 10 in the circles, then put the correct number of stickers on each page.

Lizzie (age 5) was able to work independently on her project, which gave me a chance to work with AJ (age 3).

She does very well with her counting, but is still in the pre-writing stage, so I wrote out all her numbers for her. This also gave me a chance to work with her on recognizing the written numeral.

When the pages were done, we punched a hole in the top corner of each page.

The girls put the pages in order and decorated the front covers of their book.

We then put a small length of yarn through the holes to bind the book together. (Keep the yarn a bit loose, so you can turn the pages easily). Voila! Fun and easy counting books!

Have you done any fun counting activities lately?