Prepare:

• Five hearts of card
• Make numbers 1-5 on them
• On the opposite side make equal amount of circles for example in a dice pattern
• Heart manipulatives – mine are soft stickers

This was a good activity to do on the carpet, I always place a piece of large cardboard down as a ‘table’, this gives a good limit and boundary for the children to be mindful of. I had 11 of our, mostly 4 year old, kids around our ‘table’.

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We started this activity by counting to five and placing down all the heart cards. We looked at the numbers and named them all and then turned the cards around and counted the dots. I had the hearts in a bowl and gave them to the first kid to my right asking them to take one and pass it on to the next one (this is good practise for taking turns) I then asked the kids to place the heart on a dot. The goal was to ‘fill the hearts’.

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The first round went ok, but as we did it again the kids really started paying attention to when the hearts are full and where they actually want to place their hearts. On the third time around as the kids were ever so confident of their skills we decided to do the “harder side” and flipped the cards so that we had the number side up! It took a bit more thinking and counting to do this round as there were no dots to put the hearts on, just the numbers. The kids did such a great job! Especially on a day where everyone seemed to have ants in their pants and there was a whole lot of restless jumping around 😀

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❤