Storybook Math

The Deer Run Library's children's staff (Lori, Darol, & Julie) hosted a fun preschool program last year called Storybook Math, with thanks to many sources for the ideas!

This station allowed kids to re-create photos using shape blocks.

Darol brought the cards and blocks in from her basement of treasures.

Here, kids could create their own picture using pre-cut construction paper shapes

(inspired by "The Shape of Things" by Dayle Ann Dodds).

We had a variety of : Pete the Cat"-inspired activities (Pete is so very inspirational):

1. Roll the dice to determine what color to color Pete's shoes.

2. Sort Pete's Buttons

3. Add the correct # of buttons to Pete's coat

I love the book "Soup for One" by Ethan Long. I found clip art of bowl of soup and created this worksheet. Kids could stick on as many fun foam bugs as they wished. Then they counted the bugs and recorded the number on the worksheet.

We are also big fans of the Life-Size books published by Seven Footer Press. The very talented Darol created this life-sized tiger so that kids could see how they measured up.

The kids could compare the size of their hand to the tigers paw, see how many tiger paws tall they were, or measure things around the room with the tiger paw.

For some reason we have a large amount of adding machine tape. Parents helped kids measure themselves with the adding machine tape, then they decorated the tape and hung them. We ended up with a bar graph of the heights of our participants (and librarians).

The kids were encouraged to sort pom poms by size, using kid tweezers (fine motor skills!).

Who doesn't love sorting socks? I printed clip art socks on scrapbook paper so that I could have argyle socks included in the mix. :) There are a LOT of great sock books to include with this activity.

Three Little Pig activities that we included were: 

1. Build a structure using straw (straws!), sticks (pencils), or bricks (Legos).

Then try to huff and puff and blow your structure down!

2. Darol drew these multi-colored pigs and wolves. Kids could create patterns using the pigs

(pig, pig, pig, wolf!).

This was a really fun program and both kids and parents had a great time!

Who knew math could be so entertaining?