Is your preschooler starting to dig in to exploring her preschool math skills, like learning her numbers and early arithmetic? If so, she’s not alone! My 4-year old has also taken a strong interest of late in playing with number concepts, so we’ve recently explored a variety of fun, preschool math activities, including some that foster counting and one-to-one correspondence using a classic Hundreds Chart. Today, we focus on building our little’s math literacy (a.k.a. reading numbers and words) and fundamental addition and subtraction skills by going fishing together! Come join the fun, it’s so easy to do.

Materials:

• My Fish Bowl worksheet
• My Fish Bowl Number Strips worksheet
• Goldfish manipulatives, either cut from construction paper (see photo above) or Goldfish crackers (yummy!)

Directions:

1. Prepare your fish bowl and number strips. Print the My Fish Bowl worksheets and cut apart both the number and written word on each number strip.
2. Put fish into your bowl. Ask your child to select a number strip and place it below the bowl. Invite her to read the number on the strip and place the correct number of goldfish into the bowl. Continue playing until all strips have been completed.
3. For an added challenge: adding and subtracting fish. Explore the concepts of adding and subtracting through storytelling. Follow along with the story below and have your child add or subtract the correct number of goldfish as told. After reading each sentence, ask her “How many fish are in the bowl?” Start off with simple arithmetic using numbers 1-5, before increasing the difficulty to larger numbers as she begins to master the skill.

Once upon a time, there was a little fish swimming in a bowl. His name was Fred.

He was lonely swimming by himself, so invited his two friends, Betsy and Flipper, into his bowl to play.

After splashing all morning together, Betsy’s mom and dad came to the bowl to take Betsy home.

The three fish left the bowl.

After eating a tasty worm dinner, Flipper waved his flipper good-bye and Fred went to bed.

Developmental Milestones:

Has your child achieved the following developmental milestones yet as demonstrated in this activity? If yes, check off all the skill(s) she has already mastered to date using Playful Bee’s developmental milestones tracker. It’s absolutely FREE and so easy to use, just click HERE!

• Counts 10+ objects using one-to-one correspondence.
• Understands that numbers are not letters.
• Use mathematical thinking to solve problems.

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Playful Bee

Education Team at Playful Bee

Playful Bee is an e-Preschool that delivers inquiry-based preschool learning from the classroom to your home. Our preschool curriculum was created by our talented team of rock star teachers. With years of hands-on preschool and Kindergarten teaching experience, they've developed a high-quality preschool experience that is convenient-to-use and easy-to-teach by you, grandparents, or your nanny at home.

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