Apple Puzzles for Teaching Numbers

Image Credit:  Abundant Family Living

I have a younger group of daycare kids this year so I’m having to make adjustments to keep our activities age appropriate.  I have a couple of small babies here every day so setting aside time for constructive learning activities is challenging.  Most of the time, I have to keep our activities simple.  I need activities that don’t take a whole lot of time.  This week, I thought of a way to teach numbers with simple apple puzzles.

I used the solid red, green, and yellow apples from last week’s sorting activity to make simple apple puzzles.

Make Simple Apple Puzzles

Image Credit:  Abundant Family Living

Image Credit:  Abundant Family Living

 I divided the apples into quarters.

Image Credit:  Abundant Family Living

I wrote the number “1” on the upper left hand corner of one apple.  I drew one dot on the upper right hand corner of the apple.  I recorded 1 tally mark on the lower left hand quarter of the apple.  I wrote the number “one” on the lower right hand quarter of the apple.  I did the same thing for the numbers 2 – 10.

Image Credit:  Abundant Family Living

 I cut the apples into 4 pieces.

Image Credit:  Abundant Family Living

We practiced putting the puzzles together.  We worked on number recognition, counting the dots and tally marks, and recognizing number words.

We repeated this activity over and over again.  These kids are between 2 and 3 years old so I chose to use no more than three number apples at a time.  We didn’t focus on number order yet.  We focused on recognizing that numbers have meaning.  I wanted the kids to realize that each number stands for something.  The kids learned that each number represents an amount.

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Apple Sorting for Preschoolers

Image Credit:  Abundant Family Living

Preschool in September means apples – lots of apple activities.  September also means a new home-school year has begun so it has been a little crazy around here.  We love summer and it’s still hot here.  We’re not ready to get back into a school routine!  However, today while I was watching a few of the younger children play with my son’s old Hot Wheels cars, I thought of an apple sorting idea.  We could use the cars and a few apple printables to sort by color.

I didn’t have a lot of time to plan and gather materials so I had to act fast.

Apple Sorting Activity for Preschoolers

I printed out three apple outlines.

Image Credit:  Abundant Family Living

Apples are either red, green, or yellow so I quickly colored three apples.  It is best if you can get the kids to color the apples, but I needed to do this quickly so I colored these myself.

Image Credit:  Abundant Family Living

After I finished coloring the apples, I cut them out.  Again, it is best if the kids can do the coloring and cutting, but I was in a hurry.  I believe in allowing the kids to do as much as they can on their own, but my time was very limited and my main goal for the little time I had was to work on sorting.

Image Credit:  Abundant Family Living

After quickly coloring and cutting out the red, green, and yellow apples, I placed them on the floor where the kids were playing with the cars.

Image Credit:  Abundant Family Living

I asked the kids to identify the colors and made sure they knew which apple was red, which one was green, and which one was yellow.  Then, I asked them to pick out the red, green, and yellow vehicles.  They placed the red vehicles on the red apple, the green vehicles on the green apple, and the yellow vehicles on the yellow apple.

Image Credit:  Abundant Family Living

The kids thought they were just playing with cars, but they were also learning colors and sorting skills.  We also counted the number of cars on each apple.

If you would like to print out the apple pattern for apple sorting or other apple activities for your kids, simply right click on the image below and save it to your computer.  It’s free!

Image Credit:  Clker-Free-Vector-Images - CCO Public Domain Image - via Pixabay

Here are a few apple themed books you can read with your kids while doing apple activities.

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