One pack of mini erasers (or any manipulative) and a sheet of construction paper turned into three easy learning activities for my preschooler.
I spotted packs of these “mini reward erasers” at the Target Dollar Spot and had the girls pick out one pack for each of them.
Elena chose the unicorns and rainbows pack. Lia chose the colorful shapes.
It was a good deal if you’re into tiny erasers.
I paid a dollar for each pack of 60ish erasers.
Now you may be thinking, why the heck do you need 120 tiny erasers?
Well, I immediately thought these erasers would make great manipulatives for counting, sorting, tracing, etc.
Three Math Activities Using Erasers
Manipulatives are any objects that we can use to teach our kids math concepts, such as counting.
You can use whatever object you like as a math manipulative!
Having objects to hold, touch, and interact with help us experience abstract ideas in a concrete way. (Here’s an article about that!)
For example, Elena could count to 10 a couple years ago, but she didn’t understand that those numbers stood of amounts of things until we started counting real objects.
Math can be kind of tedious for me, but I liked shopping for the cute erasers with the kids, and they enjoyed picking out the ones they wanted.
I think it helped all three of us be extra excited about these math activities with the tiny erasers!
Counting with Manipulatives
I drew a 2×5 grid on construction paper with a permanent marker and wrote numbers 1-10 clearly at the top of each box.
(Have you ever tried dividing a sheet of paper into fifths? Not that easy.)
I also provided a pair of tongs for picking up the erasers, but Elena preferred using her hands for most of the math activity.
Here’s one shot of the one time she used the tongs!
Elena counted out the appropriate number of mini erasers and placed them in each box.
I’m a little surprised at how well she was able to focus.
Little sister Lia was very loudly doing her own eraser activity next to Elena.
“GREEN! SQUARE! RED SQUARE!!”
(You can read about that experience in my next post.)
Elena was motivated enough to finish, but not enough to do the same activity twice. 🙂
So we moved on to the next one.
Numeral Tracing with Manipulatives
Pom pom letter tracing is one activity we like to do to get comfortable with letters.
Tiny erasers like these lend themselves to an easy letter or number tracing activity.
I wrote the number 2 on a sheet of paper and Elena used the erasers to outline the numeral.
She also did a 4 and a 10 and a couple letters.
R for rainbow and U for unicorn.
Patterning with Manipulatives
Patterning is something I know is a math skill, but we rarely do!
We tried it this time with the mini erasers.
Elena did an ABAB pattern on the 4.
Then she tried her own very complex one of ABCDB on the table during quiet time!
Next Steps
These little erasers inspired a great time of learning and busy work for my preschooler.
I think I’ll make a box with counting cards, sorting bowls, and letters and numbers to trace with the erasers for quiet time.
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It’s Your Turn!
Here is a short list of math skills you can practice with tiny erasers!
- counting
- sorting
- patterning
- measuring
- adding
- subtracting
Do you have mini erasers or other small manipulatives to try this with, too?
I thought this pack of 100 erasers was cute.
Did you know you can also make your own mini erasers? This set comes with an instruction book and a rainbow of eraser clay so you can make your own!
In my next post, I’ll show you what my 2-year-old did with the erasers and suggest a few more games to try with mini erasers or other small, fun objects!
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