Preschool Math: Counting and Addition with Pancakes

I thought it would be cute to teach counting and addition with pancake toppings. It ended up being a fun and engaging way to teach these concepts!

Pancake Counting and Addition Game

This week the Playful Preschool theme is pancakes. Yum! The team is excited to share a bunch of playful activities related to pancakes. Don’t forget to check out all of the posts at the bottom of this post.

We’ve begun to teach Evan how to add two numbers, so I thought this would be a great, tactile way to work on addition. The use of two kinds of berries is an excellent visual for showing kids how two numbers are added together to make another larger number.

Materials Needed:

Pancake printable

Strawberries printable

Blueberries printable

Die (dice)

Activity Prep:

1. I just used Google images to find an image of a pancake and printed it. Then I searched for blueberry clipart and strawberry clip art and printed 10 of each berry. If you don’t want to deal with searching for images and printing them, you could use a brown paper circle for the pancake and red and blue paper circles for the berries. You could also use blue and red pom poms.

Activity Details:

At first, I just told Evan how many berries to add to the pancake. For example, I would ask him to add 2 strawberries to the pancake and he would count out 2 and lay them on the pancake. Then I would ask him to add 3 blueberries. He would count out 3 blueberries and lay them on the pancake with the strawberries. Then I would ask him to tell how many berries were on the pancake in all. He would then count all the berries and tell me the answer. Since he is new to addition, I kept the numbers small.

Pancake Counting and Addition Game

After a few rounds like that, I then let him roll the dice to find out how many of each berry he should add to the pancake. Then he would count them all up and tell me how many berries there were in all.

Eventually, he just began adding any amount of berries he wanted to the pancake and would then count them all up.

Pancake Counting and Addition Game

I am really pleased with the progress he made in just a short time while working on this activity. I love that it is such a great visual representation of addition.

More awesome pancake theme ideas from the PLAYful Preschool Team!

Beginning Sound Pancakes from Growing Book by Book
Pancake Shape Toss by Rainy Day Mum
Making Rainbow Pancakes by Still Playing School
Pancake Store and Other Pancake Theme Ideas by The Educators’ Spin On It

 
Here are some related posts I think you will enjoy!

Teaching Patterns: Pancakes and Fruit Skewers

Roll and Dot the Number

Lego Duplo Tower Counting Game

Smack the Number Counting Game