Teach Your Toddler Numbers With Beads and Pipe-Cleaners

I came across this wonderful post by Anna over at The Imagination Tree a few weeks ago.  The nexy day the boy woke up at some truly ungodly hour and after breakfast we had a great time playing this until the rest of the world woke up.

It was so quick to set up and there are hardly any supplies required.

The Imagination Tree is chock-a-block full of great play-based learning posts so if you are ever stuck for inspiration I strongly advise you to pay this blog a visit.

For this activity this was all we needed:

• Five small pieces of card, folded.
• Five different coloured pipe-cleaners.
• Coloured beads.
• Coloured pens.
• (Anna also used playdough to stick the ends of the pipe-cleaners into but we didn’t have any…shocking I know!)

First I asked W to pick out one red bead from the pot while I scribbled a red number 1 on a piece of card in red pen.  He then threaded this onto the red pipe-cleaner.  We didn’t have any play-dough so I twisted the ends together to form a ring and tuck away the sharp edges.

Next I asked him to pick out two pink beads which he then threaded onto a pink pipe-cleaner while I drew out a pink number 2 on a second piece of card.

We repeated this with numbers three, four and five using different coloured beads and pipe-cleaners each time.

I then laid out the numbered cards.  W would pick out a ring and count how many beads were on it.  I would then ask him if he could place this over the correct numbered card.

He got the hang of it pretty quickly though I think in the beginning he was mainly going by matching colours rather than numeral recognition. Now he is more familiar with numbers we may mix up the colours a bit or even draw out the numbers in black.

This was such a quick and simple game to set up and one he enjoys playing with quite often.

Skills Your Toddler Will Learn:

• Counting when sorting out beads from the pot.
• Colour recognition sorting out beads from the pot.
• Fine motor skills drawing beads from the pot and threading pipe-cleaners.
• Colour matching beads to pipe-cleaners.
• Number recognition.

And the more we have played it the more fun we have had.  Check out the smile!

For more play-based learning ideas why not check out my Learn to Play and Play to Learn Page and Pinterest board?

We are also linking up to Monday Kid Corner.