Christmas Craft to practice Counting

1. Pipe cleaner candy canes. This craft was super simple, but excellent for developing fine motor skills and patterning. We took half of a red pipe cleaner and bent it to look like a candy cane. We decided to do a 20 day countdown, so we made 20 red pipe cleaner candy canes. Next we took piece of green and white pipe cleaner and put them on the red ‘candy cane’. The first red pipe cleaner candy cane had one stripe (green), the second had two stripes (green, white), the third had three strips (green, white, green) and so on. These candy canes were our regular ‘counting by ones’ count down. Sammy has been practicing counting by 1′s a lot – like with this monster number activity.

3. Mini marshmallow Snowmen. We made these little snowmen, but decided not to hang them on our Christmas countdown line. We have two little marshmallow monsters in the house, and hanging marshmallows over head and out of reach for 20 days would just be cruel. But they turned out super cute and were a great way to practice counting by 3′s! Madeline simply stuck 3 mini marshmallows onto a toothpick and added eyes and a nose so it looked like a snowman. Since we were skip counting by 3′s, the number 3 had one snowman, the number 6 had 2 snowmen stuck together with toothpicks, and so on.