This Candy Shop Pom Pom Game will help young children practice counting skills. It’s also very easy to set up and reuse through the year!
The candy shop pom pom game activity uses inexpensive, simple materials. You can easily use whatever you have available, since most early childhood classrooms have some craft pom poms somewhere.
This activity can easily be adapted for a variety of seasons and holidays.
For the pom pom game, you will need:
- craft pom poms (any colors)
- clear plastic jar or cup (use whatever you have available)
- any kind of tongs (optional)
- bowl or plate for children to place their “candy”
- coin cards or number cards (get the printable here)
Place the pom poms in the clear jar to use as the “candy”. For the game cards, you can use coin cards or number cards. You can either use the printables I’ve provided for free here, or make your own with index cards. Simply write numbers on the index cards, or make coin cards by adding coin stickers. You can even hot glue real pennies to sturdy cards to make coin cards.
How to Play the Pom Pom Game:
For this pom pom game, children will draw a card from the stack and count the coins on the card (or name the number if you choose to use number cards). Then they will count out that many pom poms (candy) into their bowl or plate. Continue the counting game until all of the candy is gone from the jar.
Children can play this game by themselves or with a friend or small group, so it’s perfect for a center activity or a small group game.
It’s easy to vary this counting game for the seasons and holidays by simply changing the colors of the pom poms!
This way, you can use this game in your Math Center all year long (as long as the children are still enjoying it). Keeping the same game with variations in a learning center all year can be beneficial because children always know how to play the game. They can go right to it at any time, and already know how to play.
You can also increase the difficulty of the game later in the year by adding number cards with higher numbers.
Download the Coin and Number Cards Here
This is a free printable. Just click to download.
Download: Coin and Number Cards
Here are some ideas for seasonal and holiday versions of the Candy Counting Pom Pom Game.
Fall Candy Shop Math
Simply change the pom poms to Fall colors, such as brown, orange, yellow, green.
Halloween Candy Shop Math
For a Halloween version, change the colors to orange, black, green, and purple.
Christmas Candy Shop Math
At Christmas time, change the pom pom colors to red and green.
Winter Candy Shop Math
In the Winter, use the colors blue and white for the candy pieces.
Valentine Candy Shop Math
Near Valentine’s Day, use pink, red, and white pom poms.
I hope your little learners enjoy this simple and fun pom pom game! You can find more PreK Counting Activities for your students here.
More Counting Activities:
You’ll also enjoy this Counting Math Intervention resource:
This bundle of Counting Math Interventions will help you provide an introduction to counting or remediation for children who need extra help counting with one-to-one correspondence. These games are fun and engaging and were especially designed for PreK children!
Math Counting Intervention Bundle
Here’s what teachers are saying about this resource:
A useful resource to support students learning how to count. The students I work with need much variation to help them understand number and counting. Really useful to date and will continue to be as we work up to counting to 10.
Jane G.
My kiddos love games and we treat these like games. We play them at circle time and also in small groups. The kids ask to play them even when I don’t have them on the lesson plan.
Elizabeth J.