Playful math activities for kids : Teach number bonds using picture books

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This math activity for kids uses a picture book to explore addition and number bonds.

It is too early to memorize math facts for Big A. In order to understand and have fun with addition and number bonds we used a picture book. One more bunny: Adding from one to ten is a an adorable book with amazing illustrations and the book kept my daughter’s attention for a long time. A bunny is playing at a park and one by one more bunnies join him. Each page also shows the number bonds { making 10}

Using the story as a base, we created our own bunnies out of bottle caps and replaced the park with grassy meadows. Here is a hands on way to show number bonds to make math activities for kids exciting.

Materials

• Bottle Caps)
• Bunny printable
• Yogurt container lids
• Markers and Glue
• Number cards

Prep for number bonds and addition math activity

• I cut out a rabbit printable and used white glue to stick them on top of bottle caps.
• Later I drew grass on yogurt container lids and placed one bunny on each lid
• I used thick card stock paper to cut out squares and wrote down the numers (1-10) along with a card for “+” and “=”
• We followed along the story of “One more bunny” and started narrating and adapting the story.

Important: Don’t expect your child to get all bright eyed and bushy tailed about math, addition and number bonds just because you. stuck some bunnies on caps. If that happens, good for you!

Introducing kids to fun math activities at an early age serve as strong basis for the child’s like or dislike for the subject. Fewer work sheets and more manipulatives might make all math activities fun math activities, don’t you think? What I did here was to create a story based on the book.. We kept the book close by and read the story and enacted it out using our bottle cap bunnies.

Step 1 : 6 bunnies are playing on 6 grassy meadows (lids)

Step 2: One bunny hops on over and joins another bunny on his grassy meadow. Once the kid has added the two, have them flip the number cards from 1 to 2 { addition exercise}

Step 3: Continue the same for more numbers.

I stopped at 6. Make sure you create a new reason for each bunny joining the group just to keep it interesting. .. eg: That bunny saw a snake in the grass. So he ran over to his other friends and joined them in the meadow. Now 5 bunnies + 1 scared little bunny makes 6 bunnies in our meadow.

Step 4: Once addition practice was over we moved on to number bonds for 3, 4 and 5.

Step 5: I placed 4 bunnies on a meadow and asked my child to split them in to 2 groups so that they can have more space to play ( insert your fun reason to extend the story)

Step 6: Kid instinctively will split them into equal numbers. I placed the corresponding number cards below each meadow and showed how 4 was formed.

Step 7: Have her think of another way to split the same 4 bunnies into 2 meadows. Stress that the meadows don’t have to have the same number of bunnies.

Step 8: Flip the number cards to 3 and 1 and show her how 4 can be formed in 2 ways.

We continued the same for 5 as well.

My child sat through the entire math activity ONLY because we had a really fun story line going on. The reasons for the bunnies doing certain things tickled her and she got thinking about the concept.

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