Adding colorful, themed math activities to your classroom or home is a great way to keep kids engaged and excited to learn. This spring math activity for preschool and kindergarten is an easy center to create and one that kids will love. It’s also an easy way to encourage skills in number recognition, counting and matching.
Whether you’re looking for an activity for kids to enjoy for Easter or spring, this activity can be used for either, or both. If you work with young children you know that if you place materials out that are colorful and hands-on kids are drawn to them.
Teachers will love this activity because of the math skills that are covered and skills kids will learn through play.
For more math activities, check out a Spring Math Activity for Preschool and the Best Spring Sensory Bin for Kids, both with free printables!
Spring Math Activity Materials
If you have plastic eggs left over from Easter then this center is especially easy to set up. You will need:
- Plastic Eggs
- Mini Cups
- Permanent Marker
- Basket
Before you set up the center, you need to decide what numbers you are going to focus on. If you are working with preschool children 1-10 may be enough. For older children, you can use more eggs and higher numbers.
I used the mini cups and wrote numbers 1-20 on the inside of each cup. You do not need to use these cups, but it was an easy place for kids to place the eggs once they had matched them. You can simply tape the cups to a table or create a small board to glue them to (as I have shown below).
Children match the numbers in any way. You can make dots and tally’s as I have done, or you can print the number name for kids to match, i.e., the word one to the number 1.
Make sure that each egg has a match and then crack the eggs so that kids have to search for the match in the basket.
Spring Math Set Up
Place the egg halves in a basket or container on the table along with the cups. Children can choose one half and search for the matching half or lay all of the eggs out to match. It’s up to them how they choose to solve the challenge.
As children find the match to each half, they put the egg together and then place it in/on the cup with the same number.
Children have to be able to recognize the number on the egg and then find the match.
Number Matching Game
It’s up to you if you print different ways of representing the different numbers. You can use numbers and tally’s on each egg if this is a math concept you are working on with your children. We have been working on subitizing as well as tally’s so I used both.
This made the activity more challenging because my students had to count the tally’s or the dots for each number. My students worked in groups of 3-4 to complete the challenge and it worked well with a team.
It was challenging especially at the beginning where there are forty egg halves on the table. However, children quickly found as they started matching that it got easier and easier.
They were constantly counting and working on their number recognition in order to match all of the eggs. It was great because they felt that they were playing a game, but they were learning at the same time.
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