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.

Outdoor Learning: Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

Just like every other PreK-er I have ever met, we love Chicka Chicka, Boom Boom. Today during our outdoor time, I drew a large tree with sidewalk chalk. All the kiddos worked together to add letters to our letter tree.

Sometimes combining gross motor with fine motor skills makes activities more accessible to more students. My students who have a hard time forming/tracing shapes on paper, were able to make closer approximations to letters on this larger scale!