Counting

Posted by Nicole Carney on Jul 18, 2012 in Math Activities, Picture Book Activities | 0 comments

So far M has chosen Mmm, Cookies! by Robert Munsch as one of his bedtime stories every night this week. I figured M would enjoy making his own play clay cookies like in the book, but I also thought it might be fun to use ‘cookies’ as a way for M to work on developing his number sense. At the beginning of the book, Munsch provides a recipe so the kids can create their own play clay cookies. I used a slightly different salt dough recipe due to the fact that I wanted M’s cookies to dry so we could paint them and use them as Math manipulatives. The recipe I used is intended for drying the salt dough in the microwave, which you can find here.

First, M helped me make and knead the dough (I added a couple drops of yellow food colouring to make it look more like golden baked cookies):

Then we rolled out the dough and cut out twenty circles using a cookie cutter:

After the cookies had dried (if using a microwave make sure to check them often so they don’t burn or start to bubble) we painted ‘chocolate chips’, counting from 1-10, on 10 of the cookies, and then wrote the coinciding numbers on the other 10 cookies. I used non-toxic paint and markers just in case M had an overwhelming urge to try and eat one when I wasn’t looking…

Originally I meant to write the odd numbers in blue and the even numbers in pink, but I became distracted and wrote them ALL in blue. Then I had the bright idea of tracing all of the odd numbers in pink, but I was distracted yet a SECOND TIME when I was halfway through, and accidentally highlighted an even number….Yeesh! So I ended up tracing ALL of them in pink, and just starred the cookies with the even numbers. Ha! I’ve discovered that having 2 kids under the age of 3 provides my day with very frequent interruptions and distractions, and therefore many half finished projects!

But, I digress… The POINT of creating these cookies was for M to build his number sense skills. With these number cookies he can: match the chocolate chip cookies to the written number cookies, put the cookies in an ordered sequence, conduct simple addition problems, find odd and even numbers, and learn about skip-counting by 2’s. You could also use number cookies to teach multiplication and division facts.

Here’s M matching the chocolate chip cookies to the number cookies: