Kindergarten Preschool Toddler
PrintablesHolidaysFine Motor ActivitiesMath
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Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way! Oh, what fun it is to decorate Christmas trees!
With Christmas time quickly approaching, it is time to get into the spirit. This fun playdough ornament counting printable is a wonderful hands-on activity that gets kids excited to count and decorate for the holiday season.
Using the Play Dough Ornament Counting Printable
This printable activity includes ten Christmas trees and each tree has a yellow star with a number 1-10.
You’ll want to be sure to laminate the trees before cutting them out for durability while using the playdough. If you find yourself with dried out containers, there are some fun and easy playdough recipes available to make your own.
Think of it as a bonus activity just using simple ingredients you probably have on hand.
Color and Number Recognition
Once you have your ten trees and playdough ready, let the children choose a color to begin making an ornament.
For children working on color recognition, this activity provides a great opportunity to talk about each color before they decide.
They will continue to make enough ornaments to match the number found at the top of the tree and once all of the Christmas trees have been decorated with the correct number of ornaments, take a few moments to strengthen their visual perception skills.
Have the children observe the differences between how empty the number 1 tree is versus how full the number 10 tree is, the difference is pretty drastic.
Fine Motor Skills Development
Now, we’ve counted with Christmas trees before and it was always such a fun activity, but when it comes to toddlers and preschoolers, I’ve found that adding playdough makes everything better.
Anything with playdough is always a hit around here.
Kids love to squish it, mash it, roll it, and basically just play with it however they can. This, of course, we love because they are getting a total fine motor skills workout with each play session.
This playdough ornament counting printable is the perfect activity to strengthen their whole hands as they’ll have to make a total of 55 balls to complete this activity if they complete it alone.
That is a big job for some little hands.
One idea that could be fun for younger kids is to be in a group or in pairs.
For older kids, they could try to create other shapes, like triangles or squares to work on dexterity in the fingers.
No matter what their ornaments turn out looking like, they will have fun while working on those small motor muscles!
