My daughter and I have been having so much fun learning how to count to 10. If you missed our post last week, 10 square fun we played this game all week. So, in hopes of keeping things fresh and fun, I decided to come up with another way for us to count to 10, recognize our colors, work on fine motor skills, and get the wiggles out.

Materials Needed

• 2 Gumball Machine printout (Free download here)
• Pom Poms (you can use colored beads or gumballs)
• 2 Plastic cups
• 10 square

My Lesson Plan

• I placed the pom poms in the gumball machine print out (so they looked like gumballs). I set one plastic cup next to the gumball machine and the other cup on the other side of the room.
• I asked my daughter to pick up a “gumball”, tell me what color it is, and then place it in the cup and run to the other side and dump her “gumball” into the other cup and run back.
• Repeat step 2 but make the way they get to the other cup different each time. Examples: I had my daughter skip, hop like a bunny, stop, straight leg walk, and lung over to the other cup.
• Once all the “gumballs” were out of the machine, we went and dumped her cup of “gumballs out” and sorted them by color.
• I then asked her to take all the pink “gumballs” and place them on her 10 squares. Reiterating one “gumball” in each square. Once she finished, we used our finger and counted the “gumballs.”
• We repeated this step with all the different colors.
• Then together, we laid them all out and counted them all together. ( I actually used the rhythm of the song One little, two little, three little fingers to count)

Once we played this a few times, I gave my daughter the second Gumball machine print out and asked her to draw her own gumballs and color them any color she wanted. I used this opportunity to help her hold a colored pencil properly. She then practiced drawing her circles and coloring them.

This was a fun activity that quickly led to a trip to the grocery store for some real gumballs. We enjoyed this game and hope that you do too.