A Tree Dice Game

This week we tried the fall dice game after reading this post from My Montessori Journey.  I got bored with our numbers and counters activity that I wanted to try a different approach with math this time.

Since I'm saving ink, I just made all of these out of cardstock instead of the ones made available for download.  I made the dice direction by drawing the leaves, use crayons to color them and added the dice counterparts (was based on the original file).    This would have been better if I made the tree trunk out of brown foam sheet though so I can reuse it in the future.  But the thing is I can't find a brown foam sheet here so I might as well redo the tree trunk out of a felt paper.  Anyway, for the maple leaves... I printed it out of different colored cardstocks and cut each one.  It requires a lot of work, but you can save a lot of time if you can purchase small craft foam leaves.   

Here’s how my version works:

1. Position the tree.
2. Make the child identify the number that appears after rolling/tossing the dice. 
3. Based on your dice direction (see white paper), put the colored leaf that corresponds to the number of the dice.
4. If your child doesn’t recognize the number dots on the dice you can have him match it to your direction card.

      

My son loves playing this game.  He enjoys tossing the dice and becomes giddy every time he puts a leaf on the tree.  He can easily recognize the dots on the dice from 1-4 but gets confuse between 5 and 6 at at times.  We will continue playing this game especially Fall is just around the corner :)

 

Later on, he decided to group the leaves according to their colors :)