I recently wrote about teaching syllables with children’s photos. Today I’m sharing some math activities with children’s photos. Children love to do activities with photos of themselves and their friends.
You can use either color photos laminated to be used multiple times, or you can photocopy a sheet of photos in black and white that can be cut out and glued. (I cut these out for the children in advance.)
Here are three activities to practice math skills with children’s photos.
Classification with Photos
Children use the photos to classify their classmates into two groups: boys and girls. This is a great activity to use at the beginning of the year as an introduction to classification. You might even want to introduce this at large group time (a.k.a. circle time) and have children put themselves into two groups, with the boys standing on one side of the room and the girls standing on the other. This is a pretty simple activity for 4 year olds, and I’ve never had any get it wrong, so it works great as an introduction. You can either use laminated photos, or have children glue the black and white photocopies on paper. (This also counts as a social studies skill because they are identifying differences in people.)
Counting with Photos
Have your prekinders practice counting skills by counting out photos. At small group, you could call out a number and have the children in the group count out the photos. Or give them a number card, have them identify the numeral and count out the correct amount of photos. I have several sets of these number cards (like the green one in the picture). I used colored card stock to print the numbers, and then cut and laminated the cards. Each set is printed on a different color and each set has numerals 1-10.
You could also have children make a counting book by gluing photocopied photos on the pages. The pages of the book could go like this (sung to the tune of Ten Little Fingers):
One little,
Two little,
Three little children.
Four little,
Five little,
Six little children.
Seven little,
Eight little,
Nine little children.
Ten little children having fun.
Patterning with Photos
Have your prekinders make an AB pattern by placing their classmates’ photos in a row of boy, girl, boy, girl. You can also introduce this at large group time by lining the children up in a pattern of boy, girl, boy, girl.
