Pre-math activities are meant to help our children understand math basics before they start school. It gives them the opportunity to familiarize themselves with how math works and to start working on the skills they will need later on.
The key here is to make it fun and hands-on so preschoolers can truly engage in what they’re doing and learn in a more effective way. Math is fun to teach at this stage of your child’s development because a lot of things in everyday life involve math, meaning they can learn through play rather than just sitting down and working with numbers.
1. Colour Sorting Activities
Sorting is one of the skills that preschoolers benefit from practicing a lot, plus, it’s super fun and it can be done in many different ways.
For one, you can create a colour sorting board. Just take a large piece of cardboard and draw 6 big circles. Inside each circle, put the name of a different colour and make sure the name is in the right colour so your children can use it as a reference. You can include green, red, blue, yellow, orange and purple.
Then, hand your kids a bucket of LEGOs, pom poms or small toys of different colours, and have them match with the colour in the circles.
You can also do this activity with coloured tape. Just place the tape on the ground or on cardboard and make shapes out of it so your children can use pom poms, LEGOs, or small toys to match the colour of the tape.
If you want to make it even better, you can draw coloured circles on a piece of white paper and hand you little ones a bag of jelly beans, gummy bears, astros or smarties which they can sort into the correct circles on the page. When they’re done, they get to eat a delicious treat!
2. Star Number Cards
For this activity, you’ll need construction paper, a black sharpie and lots of star stickers. Make cards with the outline of stars from 1 to 20 or however high your children know their numbers. Then, have your kids count the stars while placing a sticker over each one of them. This won’t only help them memorize their numbers in a fun way, it will encourage fine motor skills as they peel the stickers and place them on the cards.
3. Number Balloons
Number balloons is a seriously fun activity your kids will enjoy and it’s so easy to set up. Just take balloons of different colours and a black sharpie. Inflate them, and number them all from 1 to 10. Hide them around the house when your kids aren’t watching and then explain that they need to find all the balloons. The challenge is that they must find them in the right order. This means that if they find, say, balloon number 5, they have to leave it where it is and look for balloon number 1 until they’re ready to find balloon number 5.
iKids have some great activities to encourage pre-math skills including this wooden number puzzle.
