This week marks the start of Spring! As flowers bloom and the weather warms up, it’s a great time to explore early math concepts with hands-on, seasonal activities inspired by nature. This article shares simple and creative ideas that will help young children build foundational math skills, like counting, categorization, and matching, while appreciating the freshness of the new season!
This activity invites little ones to explore all that nature has to offer with a scavenger hunt! Take the children outside and encourage them to find and count items from nature that fit into certain categories. You might want to print out this nature hunt suggestion guide, that lists and illustrates items of various shapes, lengths, and types. Or, you can create your own guide, featuring items that can be found in your outdoor space.
For this simple activity, you will need sheets of green foam, scissors, green permanent markers, a tub (or sensory bin) for water, and mini frog toys. To set up the activity, you’ll create floating lily pads by cutting the green foam sheets into large circles and cutting a small triangle into each circle. Then, use a green or black permanent marker to write a number between 1 and 5 on each lilypad. Arrange the frogs outside of the tub, and invite the children to place the number of frogs on each lily pad that corresponds to the number written there.
You can make this activity your own by placing additional items into the sensory bin, such as flowers, cups for scooping, and other items you have available. If you don’t have a tub or sensory bin, the lily pads and frogs can also be set up on a table without the water.
This colorful, spring-themed activity invites young children to practice counting flowers in a pretend garden. You’ll need silk flowers (available for purchase at the Dollar Tree and on Amazon), colored craft sticks, green floral craft foam blocks, and white glue.
To prepare for this activity, glue the flowers to the craft sticks and set them aside, allowing them to dry completely. Once you are ready to get started, invite the children to stick the flowers into the foam blocks, as if they are planting the different flowers into a garden. Encourage them to count how many flowers they are putting into each block. You might also encourage children to sort their flowers by shapes and colors to encourage learning about pattern matching and categorization.
This counting game features a vegetable that is often associated with springtime (especially around Easter) – carrots! All you’ll need is construction paper (in brown, green, and orange), scissors, and glue.
To prep the activity, cut the orange paper into long triangles for the carrots, and write a number on each one. (For younger preschoolers, you will likely need to stick with low numbers – five and under– while older children might be ready for larger numbers.) You’ll also cut several small sticks of green paper that children will use for the carrot leaves.
When you are ready to start the activity, invite the little ones in your care to glue the leaves on top of the carrots, matching the number of leaves to the number written on each carrot.
