In this guest post Shelly writes about how she used Activity Village Christmas Stocking printables to give a festive twist to practising maths skills, including number bonds.
Christmas Stocking Maths Ideas
By Shelly
When I saw the stunning new Christmas stocking pages I immediately thought of ways we could use them to help learning number bonds. And as soon we started using them for some number bonds I started finding more and more ways you could use them so here are a few ideas for Christmas Stocking Maths.
As you can see, you can download a coloured or a black and white version of the Christmas stockings. We used the black and white version and then coloured them in ourselves. We also used our stocking pages inside Write and Wipe pockets so we could use them for multiple activities.
Colouring in one of the black and white Christmas stockings so we can use it for some maths
Festive Number line
When our kids were younger we had a few different number lines up in the house; it is a great way of helping kids recognise numbers and it also helps to enforce which numbers go where. We used to decorate our number lines with stickers or pom-poms. So if we had the Christmas stockings up in a number line, we would stick 5 stickers onto the stocking with number 5 on it, or glue on 5 pom-poms. My kids always loved decorating our number lines and it was a great way of involving them.
One to One Correspondence.
For younger kids these stocking pages would make great one-to one correspondence pages. If the stocking has the number 8 on it, the kids would need to place 8 items on top of the stocking. You could always get the kids to pick up the objects using giant tweezers or, if you have one, a tea strainer. It might sound strange but letting the kids use tea strainers is great for those little hands; opening and closing it to pick up pom-poms really can be a good strengthening activity.
Christmas stocking counting using giant tweezers or a tea strainer
Christmas stockings used for one to one correspondence
Writing Practice
You could turn the Christmas stockings into a number writing activity. The kids could copy the number onto the blank stocking on the page or they could try writing the number word. (If the kids are still working on letter formation you could also faintly write the word onto the stockings for them to trace over the letters).
Practising writing number words on the blank Christmas stockings. Using Write and Wipe pockets mean you can reuse the pages but you could also laminate them.
Greater Than and Less Than
Write the sign between the two stockings and then the kids need to choose a number that makes sense. What number could be greater than 11? They could write the number on the empty stocking or they could use some magnetic numbers to create the number.
Christmas stockings used for "greater than" and "less than"
Number Bonds
The Christmas stockings are a fun way of helping the kids to understand and practice number bonds. Choose a page and choose which number bond you want to work on. For example, if you use number 7 you could practice number bonds to 10 or to 20.
Number bonds to 20 using the Christmas stockings and some snap cubes
In our example we were working on number bonds to 20. We started off by placing 20 objects on the page (in the picture we are using snap cubes but you could use any counters or craft pom-poms for this). We then split the 20 objects on our page. By placing 12 of them on the stocking with number 12 on, the kids could see that they only had 8 left. So 12 +8 = 20.
Christmas stocking number bonds - splitting the snap cubes
I hope you enjoy our Christmas Maths as much as we have!
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 6 and 9. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on their different learning activities including lots of hands-on maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
