My six year old has letters and numbers on the brain.  After a bit of a slow-to-warm-up phase, she’s loving kindergarten. Recently, her class has been learning about skip counting. Sloane has taken it to heart and I hear her skip counting her toys, singing rhymes about skip counting in bed at night and using her fingers to figuring it all out.  The other day, as I sat and procrastinated emptying the dishwasher and switching the laundry, an idea popped into my head and a skip counting activity was born.  

Here’s what you need:

Table Salt

A Shallow Tray

A Circle Punch

Cardstock or Index Cards

Black Marker

How-To:

I had punched a lot of circles last week for another project the were working on, so I pulled those out and labeled each circle with a number from one to fifty. 

Then I poured some salt in our tray to make a skip counting base.  

I set it all out on the table and left it to see what Sloane would do.  

After some initial frustration because she couldn’t locate the numbers she was looking for, it was a hit.  She was able to demonstrate a visual representation of skip counting by two’s, five’s and ten’s.  

This activity would be a great number sense activity if you added some mini pom-poms for setting up a number line with the corresponding amount of pom-poms.  In addition to practicing her skip counting, Sloane enjoyed the sensory aspect of running her fingers through the salt, drawing in the salt and making hand prints.  There are lots of great ways to use salt trays to set up an invitation to create.  The best part? Salt is a cheap, readily available, and you likely have it in your kitchen pantry.  Have you used a salt tray? 

Looking for another salt tray activity? Click HERE.

I hope you found this post helpful.  If you want to hear more from me, please be sure to subscribe to my blog and join the conversation over on Instagram.  

-Lizzie