Outdoor Number Fun with Flowers
What you need:
Lima beans
Sturdy tape
Sticks
Flower Numbers printables
Learning Skills and Standards:
Number Concepts
Count by ones or by twos
What you do
A bundle of sticks, a pile of small rocks, some sturdy tape, and a set of number cards are the building blocks for an afternoon of number fun that includes number hunts, ordering numbers, matching numbers, and counting.
The activities presented here can be used by one child or a small group of children. The number cards selected for these activities, which show the numbers 1-15 marked in the centers of brightly colored flowers, come from the Bee and Flower Number Game. These cards can be easily taped to sticks and stuck into the soil for a number hunt. They fit nicely into outdoor environments.
Hide the flowers around the yard or outdoor area for children to find.
Create a grid with sidewalk chalk where children can match the flowers they’ve found to numbers written inside the grid squares.
Once all of the numbers have been found, encourage children to stick them back into the dirt to make a number line. If the children are developmentally ready, they can extend their number practice by ordering the numbers by twos.
Another way that children can “play outside” with numbers is to place “bees” by each “found” flower in order to show “how many” each number represents. The bee counters can be made from small rocks or beans that have been painted yellow and marked with black lines and eyes. These counters can be stored along with the flowers (removed from the sticks) and placed on a tray that children can use for on-going practice with number concepts.
Bee and Flower Number Game
Kindergarten Common Core State Standards:
K.CC.A.2: Count forward beginning from a given number within the known sequence (instead of having to begin at 1).
K.CC.A.3: Write numbers from 0 to 20. Represent a number of objects with a written numeral 0-20 (with 0 representing a count of no objects).