Pirate Pipe Cleaners Counting - Download

Arrrggh!! Counting with Pirates!

We are working on counting, number sense, and 1-to-1 correspondence. What better way than with Pirate Pipe Cleaners!? I saw a post on Pintrest about taping number cards to pipecleaners and having the children string the corresponding # of beads onto the pipecleaner. I created our Pirate version with calendar pieces I found on http://www.makinglearningfun.com.

 I thought that the cards on Making Learning Fun were too big for my purposes, so I simply copied the image and pasted in on to a Word document and modified the size. Afterwards I laminated them and used white duct tape to tape each card to a pipecleaner. I decided to go with yellow and gold pipecleaners to represent "treasure". Instead of beads (which I did not transport with us to our summer school classroom) we used various sized buttons (which our SLP did bring to our summer school placement).

Sorry about the poor quality!

I also added dots to help the students count along, or check their work. Each card has the number of dots as the number listed.

Adaptations For Different Learning Needs

• Some learners just worked on stringing beads to foster fine motor skills
• Others who struggle with fine motor skills were asked to identify the numbers, or count the dots.
• You could adapt this as a sequencing activity too.