Valentine's Day Candy Counting!

Even though my classroom is primarily for intensive speech and language therapy, we do do many pre-academic activities. This includes counting by rote and counting objects. Our counting activities are related to our vocabulary theme to make it more functional and more fun! It also reinforces our vocabulary items. For our Valentine's Day theme, we counted candy hearts!

Targets
Vocabulary- Hearts, Candy
Counting objects to 5, number recognition

First, we gathered our materials:

 

 We used regular old (delicious) conversation candy hearts, a counting sheet I hand drew and some glue. The counting sheet has a couple of things of interest--First, we use the concept of Touch Math, where the numbers have dots on them that correspond with the amount the number represents ("2" has two dots on it) for the students to count. This gives a multi-sensory twist to learning. Second, I drew dots under each number to give the students extra cueing as to how many hearts to glue on and another chance to count.

We went through the counting sheet number by number and the students were encouraged to label the number and count the dots. Then they asked for candy to put on ("I want 2 hearts") and we helped them glue them on.

We continued to 5 and then they were done!

And, of course, they were allowed to eat some--as a fellow candy lover, I couldn't withhold!! ;)
I'm sure eating the candy was the students' favorite part, but I was happy they got lots of practice with counting objects and recognizing numbers!

 

Happy Counting!