Any time a holiday is approaching you can take advantage of that holiday to maximize learning! Try Valentine’s Day Counting ideas. You can transfer these ideas to any approaching holiday and make counting fun! If your preschool child hasn’t quite mastered counting to ten or counting to twenty yet, chances are good that practice is all he or she needs. But if your preschooler is like mine have been – the best way to ensure they won’t do a task is to let them realize you want them to do it. Stubborn much?
In that case, the best tactic is to act like you don’t really care if they learn to count or not, but in the meantime make it advantageous for them to practice. Make it fun or add a treat for enticement. Or both. With Valentine’s Day approaching, now is the perfect time to try these Valentine’s Day counting ideas and while you are at it, practice counting with our Valentine Gnomes Counting Book.
Related: Valentine’s Day Dice Games for Preschool
How Many Ways Can You Count Hearts?
You can actually use the pages of the Valentine Gnomes Counting book to help with this first idea of counting candy hearts. Everyone’s favorite thematic Valentine candy has several advantages for counting. First of all, the bag includes quite a few different colors, so you can group and sort and count by color. Count all the green, count all the pink, etc. Find out which color has the most in your bag. Use the square charts in the counting book to create organized groups and rows of candy hearts. Once you’ve counted all the different colors on each page, organize the candy into patterns instead.
Next, you can use heart stickers for counting. Letting your little ones play with stickers improves fine motor skills. Have your child place one heart sticker on each gnome where his heart would be and count as you go. This helps your child keep track of where he is as he counts, and teaches one-to-one correspondence. Each gnome gets one heart sticker. You can also use the heart stickers with the square charts and count the squares as you fill them.
150 Piece Colorful Paper Gift Tags
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Sensory Ideas for Valentine’s Day Counting
To take your child’s Valentine’s counting to a new level, using mini heart erasers. Mini erasers create a very sensory experience with the smell of texture of the eraser. This is perfect if you have sensory seeking kids. Of course, you can start with our Valentine Gnomes Counting workbook pages again, but picture books are also a great idea. Here are two of my favorites:
- How Many Do I Love You? by Cheri Love-Byrd
- Counting Kisses by Karen Katz
Another great option is to use removable heart stickers and count items around the house. Explore each room and find things to count, placing stickers as you count. Count doors and windows for the whole house. Count cabinets in the kitchen, shoes in the entryway, toys in the playroom, knobs on dressers, clothes on the floor. Basically count whatever you can find, then pull the stickers off and move to a new room to find more counting fun.
Get Active with your Valentine’s Day Counting Activities
Get your kids up and moving with this heart Scavenger Hunt Counting Activity. You can approach this in a few different ways. You could hide paper hearts in your home and make a game of finding the hearts and counting who finds the most. Instead, you could hide the paper hearts outside around your yard and go outside together to count hearts. Another great idea is to make this a cooperative effort for your neighborhood of moms. If you live where you can walk down a sidewalk or apartment hall and pass the homes of others, you might be able to inspire a neighborhood-wide heart scavenger hunt.
This activity especially fun for kids right now because of the COVID restrictions. They get outside and get to interact with friends in neighbors in a completely contact-free way. Ask each neighbor to place a heart somewhere in a window facing the street, or somewhere on the exterior of the home. Take a neighborhood walk and see how many you can find. If you are super organized you could even have prizes for best heart design, best hiding spot, etc.
Play games for counting fun! Here are two of my favorite Valentine’s Day counting games to play.
- This Heart Math Counting Game from Little Bins for Little Hands uses tweezers and sensory fun to count hearts a new way.
- Try the Roll and Color Valentine’s Day Counting Game from Fun Learning For Kids.
Related: Free Valentine’s Day Party Games Pack
Valentine Gnomes Counting Book
For the last part of January and the first fourteen days of February, you can use these Valentine’s Day counting ideas with our Valentine Gnomes Counting book to help inspire your preschool child. Counting will be fun again, and in no time at all, he or she will be ready for Kindergarten math.
Our gnomes counting book has 40 pages to help your child learn to count. Each gnome is dressed in Valentine’s Day attire and ready to be counted over and over again. Use this book to help your child learn number recognition, how to count to twenty, practice one-to-one correspondence, organize and graph counted objects with the square charts, recognize number words as sight words, and write each digit 0-10.
To download the Valentine’s Day Gnome Counting Book, simply add it to your cart and then checkout. **Upon checkout, you will be added to my Weekly Newsletter list.**
