Clever Strategies for Teaching Number Recognition You Must Try!

These strategies for teaching number recognition are a must for teaching kindergarten and preschool kids subitizing, counting and numbers. Essential hands-on ideas for teaching subitizing and numbers to Kindergarten & Preschool kids!

Clever Strategies For Teaching Number Recognition

You must try these simple hands-on strategies for teaching number recognition with your Kindergarten, Preschool or Foundation aged kids. We came up with a stack of ideas to help your students to learn about numbers using everyday storecupboard supplies of pipe cleaners and beads. Using pipe cleaners and beads as a math manipulative is just as effective as expensive materials and threading beads onto pipe cleaners is a fun way to help kids learn early numeracy concepts whilst building their fine motor strength.

So grab yourself some pipe cleaners and beads and read this post to find out how to use pipe cleaners and beads for teaching this huge range of math concepts:

Comparing quantity
Subitizing
Learning colours
Counting and matching one to one correspondence
Number recognition 1-10
Number Recognition (11-19)
Simple Addition
Making 10
Place Value 10’s & 1’s

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Benefits Of Fine Motor Activities For Teaching Number Recognition

Fine motor skills are crucial for many actions that we take for granted, like feeding ourselves, holding things, doing up zippers and buttons and drawing. Learning activities that include Fine motor movements not only help students learn maths concepts but will also help kindergarten and preschoolers build the strength needed for future tasks including:

writing
holding small items
buttoning clothing
turning pages
eating
cutting with scissors
using computer keyboards

So it makes sense to teach students about numbers using play-based learning that include hands-on and fine motor exploration. Using math manipulatives is one way, but using everyday storeroom materials can be just as effective too, especially for children who do not enjoy traditional drawing, art and craft or playdough experiences.

Below you’ll find some bead and pipe cleaner threading activities to help your students learn about counting, the number sequence and number names. Your kids will love using beads and pipe cleaners rather than using the usual counters and they won’t even realise they are exercising their hand muscles, let alone learning about numbers!

Read more about the importance of Fine Motor activities in this Article.

Strategies For Teaching Number Recognition

These threading beads on pipe cleaners activities are so simple to prep and are perfect hands-on games for teaching number recognition. The hardest thing is getting your equipment ready!

Equipment

Pipe Cleaners
Pony beads
Sticky Notes, labels or number beads
Dice

Instructions

To prepare your pipe cleaners for the activities decide which numbers you are working on, 1-5, 1-10 or 1-20. Then decide if you are working on the number name or number digit. Take a stick note or label and write the numbers onto the labels, one number per label and then fix the label to a pipe cleaner. In the image below we wrote digits onto sticky notes and used the sticky patch to attach to the pipe cleaner.

If you would like some typed numbers to attach to your pipe cleaners try this sweet themed numbers 1-100 resource.

Once the numbers are fixed onto the pipe cleaners you might like to create a play tray to put the pipe cleaners in. Grab a tray and fill it with some coloured rice, beans or chickpeas or the pony beads. Next, hide the pipe cleaners in the play tray filler. Encourage your students to use tongs or tweezers to pick out a pipe cleaner for them to thread the beads onto. Continue until all the pipe cleaners have the right number of beads threaded onto them. Carry on reading for more ideas.

Pipe Cleaner Number Recognition Numbers

Pipe Cleaner & Pony Bead Strategies For Teaching Number Recognition

Activity One – Counting – one to one correspondence

We wrote the number digits on one side of the sticky note and the number words on the other.
The children then selected a pipe cleaner and threaded the matching number of pony beads onto each pipe cleaner.
We encouraged the kids to count out loud as they added each bead, they were reminded not to say the next number until the next bead had been added to the pipe cleaner, showing them that numbers said are being used to say ‘how many’, building one-to-one correspondence.
We also reinforced the idea that counting is a strategy:
- “Good mathematicians use counting to find out how many there are altogether”
- “Good mathematicians say the right number when they touch or add a bead to the pipe cleaner”
- “Good mathematicians can find out how many they need by looking at the digit”
You can also use magnetic numbers instead of labels if you like!

Pipe Cleaner Number Recognition threading

Time is Precious, Save Yours With These Number Recognition Activities!

Activity Two – Subitizing and Matching Quantity

For this activity, we wrote the numbers 1-10 on sticky notes and attached them to individual pipe cleaners.

The children took turns to roll the dice and match the number on the dice to the digit on the pipe cleaner.
We focussed on asking how many dots without counting and talked about what they saw e.g. when a 4 was rolled we talked about that it looked like. It looks like one dot in each corner or two and two.
Next they were asked “how many beads do you need to get?”
We encouraged the children to go to a separate area to get the right amount of beads. They could only go once and they couldn’t get too few or too many, they had to come back with just the right amount. This process develops a set of different counting skills. Children find this difficult compared to getting one at a time from a container right in front of them. It is a good way to extend and deepen the counting strategy.
Or you could continue as above encouraging one-to-one correspondence depending on what your children need.

Activity Three – Counting Backwards

This activity works perfectly after completion of activity one

Once the beads have been added and counted onto each pipe cleaner encourage the student to practice counting backwards by removing a bead at the same time as saying the number name.
Build the language of ‘one less’ by talking about what happens when you take one away, matching the backwards chant of 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 to the number of beads on the pipe cleaner.

Activity Four – Simple addition problems

For this activity, we wrote simple addition problems onto sticky notes.

The children selected a problem and used the beads to act out the addition process. This process reinforces the idea that addition is the joining and combining of quantities to find out how many altogether. Using different colours helps to connect the quantity to the digit.

Addition activities with pipe cleaners and beads

The activity can be extended for a range of different problems. It’s a great way to extend math language and vocabulary.
For another variation, we created a matching activity where the students matched the beads on the pipe cleaner to the correct problem on a sticky note.

matching problems to pipe cleaners

We also used our Addition Think board that we used earlier with our egg carton Number Recognition activities to reinforce the addition process.

Want More Effective Strategies For Teaching Number Recognition? Click the images to see more…

Subitising & Number Recognition think board

Activity Five – Teen numbers

Children find the teen numbers tricky for a number of different reasons. It is difficult for them to hear the subtle sound differences between ty numbers (thirt-ty) and teen numbers (thir-teen), and this is one of the main reasons they may have difficulties.

For example, say 13 and 30 without emphasising the difference yourself. When we say these numbers out loud both have a ‘thr’ sound first and a ‘t’ sound at the end but the two numbers are written differently in digits…. tricky!
What’s even more confusing are the numbers 11 and 12 which are not even teen numbers! When working on the numbers 11-19 special care is definitely needed and a lot of practice!

In this activity, we wrote the teen numbers and number words onto sticky notes.

The children selected a teen number to make and used two different coloured pony beads to make each number. We talked about how we say the teen numbers and how it is different to how we say other numbers. We also focussed on the idea that the teen part of the number means ten. For example, thirteen is 3 ten but we don’t say 3 ten we say thirteen.

Making 10 hands-on activities

Activity 6 – Making 10

For our last pipe cleaner and beads activity, we focussed on all the ways to make 10.

Write the number 10 onto the sticky note and ask the children to find as many different ways to make 10 using 2 different coloured beads. We scribed the matching number sentences onto a whiteboard for them.

You can also create opportunities for simple colour matching activities or even extend into larger numbers. Students can make bigger numbers in groups of tens and ones. There are so many possibilities from cheap but very effective everyday classroom objects. Do leave us a comment with your ideas below, we love to hear what you’ve been up to!