Valentines Early Learning Math Activities

Hands On Early Learning Math Play

These quick and easy Valentines early learning math ideas are just a small part of our Valentine’s themed play and learn series this season! We have enjoyed lots of sensory, science, fine motor, art and now Math play! These early learning math activities are great for hands on learning and make practicing skills fun! Changing up the same activities for different holidays and seasons provides the novelty young kids need to have fun and enjoy learning! With a few simple items, you can create loads of great ways to play this Valentine’s Day!

Early Learning Math Activity #1: Counting by 10’s

Activity Set Up:

I used our white activity tray and hunted around for Valentines colored objects like legos, buttons, pom poms, hearts of various materials and glass gems. For Valentines Day this year I did specifically purchase the acrylic hearts from the craft store to add to our box of manipulatives! Always fun to find new things to add! I made sure there was an accurate amount of each, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 item sand then wrote those numbers are paper hearts.

The object of the activity was to count each section and match it to the correct heart. We began by just looking at the paper hearts and talking about the numbers and their names. we put them in order and I asked him to hand me random ones as I called them out. He chose the legos first, counted them and found the number 50! Some went smoother than others!

Obviously, 10 was the easiest and he took careful count of each of the different colors of pom poms putting them in order!

Early Learning Math Activity #2: Patterning

Activity Set Up

These egg containers are awesome trays for sorting, patterning and counting! I have a huge stack of them now! I created 5 different patterns for him to repeat through both trays.

Helpful hint: We started with a white sheet of paper covering the other rows but he got the hang of it quickly!

Early Learning Math Activity #3: Math Game

Activity Set Up

I used a baking dish, white rice and heart-shaped confetti to make a sensory math roll and find hearts game with dice. He had lots of fun with this and we worked on some simple adding skills too. I had two different dice which spurred the adding practice. One had pips and one had numbers. Problem solving! I also traced hearts onto a sheet of paper and numbered them 1-12. he had to roll, add/count, find the heart on the paper and then search for hearts. He filled the correct heart on the paper with the correct amount of mini red hearts!

There was always extra counting practice when he rolled a number he had already gotten. First we would identify the number rolled and then he would count the pips starting from the number he had already found.  I gave him just one die when we were down to the heart with the number one and showed him why two would be hard to roll a 1!

Early Learning math Activity #4: Graphing

Activity Set Up

Hooray for painter’s tape. I used our table to make a huge graphing board. I then selected my materials and made sure I had the right number of each to fill in 1-10 with 10 items!

Fun and challenging! We have been working on graphing off and on this past year. To make it a bit easier for him to understand, I showed him how we would be finding how many of each item we had by placing it in this graph next to the numbers and we chose one of each item to put across the very bottom as our sample!

When we were all finished, he used his fingers to slowly trace over to the numbers to see how many he had found.

Early Learning Math Activity #5: Water Beads Math

Activity Set Up

Please visit B-Inspired Mama for all the details of this cool water beads sensory bin!

We used cookie cutters and water beads to measure the hearts.

We searched for and sorted buttons and hearts. We then sorted by colors and counted.

Early Learning Math Activity #6: Number Recognition, 1:1 Counting to 20

Activity Set Up

I used our flash cards, acrylic heart counters and an egg carton tray for this activity. Very simple but effective. I made sure the flash cards were out-of-order too! He has some trouble with 12-19 so I wanted to make sure he could in fact recognized them out-of-order. We started with 18.

He chose a flash card and counted out the appropriate amount of hearts. The tray helped him keep track of each one and allowed him the opportunity to start over if he needed to try again!

Do you have a favorite Valentine’s  early learning math activity?

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Make to sure to check out our Top 10 Valentine’s Ideas