Ten Easy Holiday Math Activities

The holidays are such a lovely time of year to spend with children! However the last few weeks before the winter break can be hectic. Here are ten easy to assemble activities that can infuse playtime with math by capturing the magic of the season! Many of the seasonal loose parts included in these photos were found at the local dollar store. Enjoy!

1. Count the Presents - offer children mini presents (or other seasonal trinkets including bells or ornaments) and number cards. Encourage children to match the corresponding number of objects to the cards. Children can also place presents on a laminated ten frame and write a corresponding addition or subtraction sentence using a dry erase marker.

2.  Holiday Sensory Bin with Mini Boxes - fill a sensory bin with seasonal trinkets and treasures. Add mini present boxes and encourage children to fill the boxes with different objects. Children can then use a hundreds grid to count how many objects fit in each box!

 

  

3. Catapult the Gingerbread Man to Safety - help mini Gingerbread Men land to safety over the river by firing them using catapults made from clothespins attached to blocks using elastics. This activity works fine motor muscles too!

4. Cookie Cutter Bell Count - display a collection of bells in a tray with a variety of seasonal cookie cutters. Challenge children to fill one cutter with bells and use a hundreds grid to count how many it holds. Which cutter holds the most? Least?

5. What's Inside the Presents? - fill different holiday boxes with loose parts. Encourage children to shake one at a time and estimate how many objects might be inside. They can then open the box and spill the objects out. Each object can be placed on a number grid and counted.

6. Fill a Tree with Trinkets - children can explore the concepts of area and perimeter by filling or outlining wooden trees (or other seasonal place mats or shapes) with a variety of bead strings, ribbons or small objects.

7. String a Pattern - secure a number of green pipe cleaners to a sturdy cardstock or cardboard base in the form of a tree. Encourage children to string beads to 'decorate' the tree using different patterns. Children can also count how many beads they use for each section.

 

8. How Many Elastics? - children can wrap a number of elastics around cookie cutters until they are filled. Encourage children to count how many times they wrap each elastic. For an added fine motor challenge have children remove the elastics one at a time.

9. Gingerbread House STEM Challenge - provide children with magnet shapes and challenge them to build an intricate gingerbread house. Ask them to search the room for various loose parts that will attach to the magnets and 'decorate' the house (e.g., here the staples in mini bows attract to the magnets).

10. Holiday Guessing Jars - fill glass jars with seasonal loose parts. Encourage children to estimate how many objects are in each jar. The objects can then be shaken out and counted using math tools such as number grids and ten frames.

 

 

Looking for a book to support holiday math learning? Check out my book Holiday Math! 

 

 

Voting for our Favourite Weather

We love having a survey at the snack centre. We find it inspires children to engage in discussions with one another regarding the posted question as the question is often written by a child which embeds literacy into the centre, and it's a great way to infuse regular math and math talk into our day.

The children have noticed the weather changing as winter fades into spring. Our snack question asked children to vote for their favourite type of weather. Rather than have children write their names under their choices, we encouraged them instead to indicate their vote with a stick. This way a visual representation of the votes could easily be seen in the clear pockets placed underneath the pictures. 

The children figured out the process of how to vote instantly. They understood that one vote equalled one stick and that to use more than one wouldn't be an accurate representation of our collective favourite type of weather. 

As children took turns voting we overheard rich math discussions; the children discussed the most popular weather type and how many votes they estimated it had. They also noticed that the two least favourite had equal votes.

This was an incredibly popular activity that was left out for a few days. Children would revisit it throughout the day to see if the votes had changed and to observe which was the favourite.

We wanted to capitalize on the children's interest in weather so we modified the activity with some new weather cards for our whole group circle time. We offered three weather choices again and this time encouraged children to place their popsicle sticks in jars next to the picture. Unlike the snack survey, this vote took place at circle with every child voting one at a time.

Unlike the first vote, the results for these weather types seemed to be more difficult to assess upon just examining the jars and we encouraged the children to suggest accurate and efficient ways to calculate the votes.

One child suggested organizing the sticks into groups of 5, because 5 was a 'friendly number' (easy to work with because we can skip count by 5s). He suggested organizing the sticks into tallies to make it clear to see how many votes each weather type had. What a fun way to infuse number sense activities (one to one correspondence, subitizing, skip counting, comparing numbers) into an area of interest the children!