Numbered Nature Tray

My youngest daughter, Maggie, is nearly 4, so I am trying to be a bit more intentional about her preschool learning. One thing that I've been focusing on lately is teaching her the numerals- she can count, but doesn't recognize written numbers. Nice spring weather is here in full force, so I've been trying to get us outside as often as possible to play AND learn. This Numbered Nature Tray was just the thing to encourage some number skill work with Maggie, but also gave the girls the chance poke around in the dirt and explore nature a bit.

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Start with a tray. We used a pretty wooden serving tray, but you could also use a large flat basket, a cutting board, or even a baking pan. Make simple number cards and set them out on the tray.

Add a little basket for gathering nature goodies. I used small baskets on purpose since I knew that our nature objects would need to be relatively small in order to fit on the tray.

Time to start gathering! First, I just asked my daughters to go and gather nature bits.

Maggie went straight to this little stash of acorn caps, and insisted that they were chocolate chips for the fairies in Grandmama's fairy garden.

She also enjoyed finding a few teeny tiny wildflowers just starting to peek out of the ground.

Once your child has done some gathering, invite them back to the number tray, and help them start adding objects around the number cards. They'll need to see how many of different objects they have.

Have them arrange the objects around the corresponding number.

They'll also need to consider the size of the objects they've collected. Lena had LOADS of these sweetgum prickles, but chose to use only a few and put them around a small number so that they wouldn't take up too much space.

The girls hadn't quite gathered enough nature to complete the tray, so we brainstormed together, thinking about different objects of the right size that they could find to finish it off. Then they went off for "Round 2" of collecting.

Arranging the leaves, acorns, sticks, berries, and flowers is great for spatial skills and precision fine motor work.

Once the tray was finished, it was time to double check and make sure that we had the right number of objects for each numeral.

Maggie found it helpful to use a stick as a pointer. She counted the different objects over and over again, making sure we had gotten everything correct.