Number Recognition Activity for Building Number Sense in Kindergarten

Building number sense with hands-on activities

Woohoo! It's Math Monday so I'm linking up with Laura of Kinder Kraziness again for number sense activities that are perfect for the beginning of the school year. These are great counting activities for preschool or kindergarten! In my classroom, we start with counting and number recognition activities to 5, then to 10 and then to 20. Number sense is a foundational math skill, so it needs to be worked on in many different ways so that students have the concept down solidly. There's no point in moving on to other skills if a students still hasn't mastered counting and number recognition! That's why hands-on number sense activities are so important, and since they're easy to differentiate, you can use the same activity with all of your students!

For the first number sense center activity, I picked up wooden blocks and dowels from Hobby Lobby, along with plastic rings:

I knew these would make a fun math activity for my students and great fine motor practice too!

I wrote the numbers 0-10 on the wooden blocks and then added the correct number of beads to each dowel, using the blocks to cap them off.

At the beginning of the school year, when my students are first learning number recognition and one to one correspondence, I'll have them arrange the blocks in numerical order. I might ask them to find me a specific number or count how many are in a set.

As my students get better at counting and number recognition, I can take the top blocks off and let them put the beads on themselves! This will be a fun way to exercise their fine motor skills at the same time giving them practice with one to one correspondence!

Although I prefer to have my students doing hands-on activities like this, every once in a while, I do let my students do a "paper". Partly so they think they're "big kids" and partly so that I have a paper record of progress. I take anecdotal notes all day long, but sometimes there's nothing like showing a parent (or admin) something tangible. So, I made some free counting worksheets for you for the beginning of the year. I always do a Woodland Animals unit in September, which leads into our Nocturnal Animals in October, so this little freebie has some cute forest friends that would go well with a Kissing Hand unit :) Just click on a picture to download and enjoy!