Here is a simple, inexpensive and beautiful nature math activity for kids! This is perfect for the homeschool or classroom setting and can be easily differentiated to meet the needs and interests of all young learners. If you love to bring the outdoors in then this one is for you!
I was perusing the dollar spot at Target and I saw a little booklet of “Find-It-Fast” activities. The point of the activity is to count different halloween pictures and record how many of each you found on the paper. The worksheet wasn’t very engaging, but I liked the idea! I thought….Hmmm, I can do that at home with nature and make it wayyyy more inviting and engaging.
So I raided our nature finds collection and picked out some favorite pieces for the activity.
Supplies:
- Nature
- Roll of paper
- Tape
- Marker
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Here’s What We Did:
First you’ll need to collect pieces of nature or dig into your nature collection. We collected pine cones, black walnuts, leaves, mossy bark and rocks. These were all loose pieces of nature that we found on the ground. Even the mossy bark was found on a bridge during a nature walk. I just broke the larger piece of bark into smaller pieces to make it work for this activity.
Next, set up the activity. I taped a large piece of paper to our table and laid the pieces of nature on the paper in a 5X5 grid fashion. Then I drew a line on the paper to separate the nature from the recording area.
If your children aren’t writers yet, you could:
- just skip the recording part all together
- write numbers on little pieces of paper and your children could glue the correct numbers on the paper
- write numbers on little post it notes and children could stick them to the correct numbers on the paper
My six year old knew exactly what to do without any explanation. He’s been enjoying learning invitations for years now so he knows the drill! He got to counting right away.
My son is really into writing numbers these days, but I was thinking you could have children write the number word or tally marks as an alternative idea.
He was so proud of his work when he was done!
If you want to try this again on another day, just erase the answers and put different amounts of the same pieces of nature on the paper.
Also, you can try this again with any collection that interests the children you are working with! You could try this with stickers, toys or even socks! Literally ANYTHING!!
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I hope you give this simple activity a try! I promise, your little nature lovers will love it as much as my boys.
∼Tara
