Preschool Bird Food Math

Hi! I'm Leslie- a homeschooling momma to an almost 5 year old girl and 18 month old boy.  The 2 are as different as night and day.  I share our adventures here to both inspire learning at home and chronicle our lives, because honestly, I never started the baby books and my kids will just have to look back on their childhood through this blog... ha! #keepinitreal

It's a new month which means a new month of Mother Goose Time learning!

This month our theme is A to Zoo and we are studying a new animal each day. 

B is for Bird and BOTH my kiddos were able to participate in our MATH activity for the day! 

Our day started with all of us creating a bird puppet (pictured above).  My son made the blue one with scribbles (he loves to color), I made the red/orange/yellow bird, and my preschooler made both the purple bird and rainbow bird.  MGT sent us all the materials! All we had to do was add some markers and glue.

We started our bird math game by first discussing birds.

"What do birds eat, Avaleigh?"

Puffins eat fish, hummingbirds eat nectar from flowers, chickens eat worms, and ducks eat bread.  Lots of birds eat seeds, too.

That unexpected response comes from her love of Puffin Rock, books, and our recent adventure to the duck pond. :)  Using playdough, we all made balls of bird seed and worms.  Even my boy made some fat worms!  I was amazed when I looked down and there was a playdough worm under his hand!

We made a bunch of bird food and added it to a bowl.  Earlier in the year, we found this abandoned bird's nest and added it to our nature collection. We decided it would be a great addition to our math game, so we placed our bird puppets that we made earlier in the nest.

MGT sent us some number cards and a picture of a bird's nest, but we chose to use our actual nest for this game.  We placed the number cards face down.  Avaleigh was challenged to flip over 2 cards, count out the number of bird food for each card, and then add them together.  She then practiced writing her numbers and wrote her first addition math sentence! 

You could even make subtraction number sentences after your bird puppets "eat" some of their food! 

We did 4 different rounds of this before she asked to play something else.

Although our game didn't last a long time, I was so happy both kids could participate and I really wanted to document both her first math sentence and his first time to play with playdough.

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