Splatting Snow on Trees

Did you know that the majority of us are kinaesthetic and tactile learners? That means we learn best through activities which are multi-sensory and hands on. These activities encourage us to look, touch, discover and they spark curiosity.

This is a fun and simple multi-sensory maths activity to teach children the concept of one less and subtraction.

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set up

For this activity I used the blue paper and white playdough from our October Polar Bear activity. I drew a tree on the card and added some hammers and the wooden numbers to reinforce my son’s number recognition.

My son is 3 and is currently learning about one less but this activity could be adapt to encouarge taking away of bigger numbers and teaching the concept of division.

The first thing we needed to do was roll up the playdough up into snowballs, which is a great fine motor skill activity, before adding them to the tree. We then counted how many snowballs were on the tree and then I asked my son to splat just one snowball (he struggled to splat just one!!). We then counted how many snowballs were left and I reinforced the language: “4 take away 1 is 3.”