Edward the Emu Story-related Math Pack for Preschoolers

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This FREE 20-page Edward the Emu Story-related Math pack is the perfect book companion for this story.

Edward the Emu, written by Sheena Knowles, is the story of Edward, an emu that lives in a zoo and, tired of the life he’s living, decides to try being something else for a change. He tries swimming with the seals, he spends a day lounging with the lions, and even slithers with the snakes. But Edward soon discovers that being an emu may be the best thing after all.

Edward the Emu Story-related Math Pack for Preschoolers

This Edward the Emu math pack includes eight different activity sets to accompany the book, helping children develop essential skills such as creative and critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, and understanding of patterns, sizes, and shapes. You can download it at the end of this post.

Count and Clip Cards

These hands-on count and clip cards offer a visual way for preschoolers to practice counting and associate the number of objects with their corresponding numbers, promoting number recognition, problem-solving, and early math skills in a fun and interactive way.

They also help children develop their fine motor skills, strengthening the small muscles in their hands and fingers, and improving their coordination.

These cards can also be used to introduce other mathematical concepts, such as addition, subtraction, and fractions, to establish a strong foundation for more complex mathematical operations.

Children need to count the objects in each card and place a clothespin over the correct numbers. To prepare the activity, print the sheets on white cardstock, cut them out, and laminate them for durability.

Memory Game

This memory game is excellent to help preschoolers develop essential cognitive skills, including visual perception, concentration, memory, one-to-one correspondence, and creating sets.

Children need to place the cards upside down, pick one, identify the object, and try to find the matching one by picking up a second card. If your card doesn’t have the same object, the children need to place that card upside down in the same place and pick another one.

The idea is for them to remember where they saw the card with any card they picked, and try to match the pairs.

This Edward the Emu pack includes two sheets with 18 cards featuring the characters in the story. Print each page twice on white cardstock for each set of the game. Cut out and laminate the cards to make them last longer.

Visual Discrimination

These activities will help preschoolers enhance their visual processing and observational skills by matching, categorizing, and recognizing differences between similar items.

Edward the Emu Circle the Larger and the Smaller

This Edward the Emu pack contains two size discrimination activities: one to circle the larger item in the row and the other to circle the smaller item. Both activities come with two sheets, each featuring three strips, that showcase different characters from the story. You can either keep the sheets together or divide the strips.

If you want to reuse the activity, print the sheets on white cardstock and laminate them or use a dry-erase pocket to protect them.

Shape Match

Shape-matching activities help preschoolers develop several cognitive, fine motor, problem-solving, hand-eye coordination, spatial reasoning, visual discrimination, and social-emotional skills, laying a good foundation for future mathematical development, including geometry.

This Edward the Emu pack includes one sheet with five different shapes to match: a circle, a square, a hexagon, an oval, and a pentagon, all featuring characters from the story inside. Children need to observe the shapes and trace a line between the same shapes using a pencil, crayon, or marker.

If you want to reuse the activity, print the sheet on white cardstock and laminate it, or use a dry-erase pocket to keep it protected.

Count and Trace

These activities help preschoolers improve cognitive abilities developing basic math concepts like counting, number recognition and quantity, and enhancing hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills and self-esteem, setting up the foundation for pre-writing and pre-math skills.

This Edward the Emu pack contains two count and trace activities: one to count how many and write the number, and another one two count how many, circle and trace the correct number. Both activities come with two sheets featuring different characters from the story.

If you want to reuse the activity, just print the sheets on white cardstock and laminate them or use a dry-erase pocket to protect them.

Math Puzzles

These activities help preschoolers improve their cognitive abilities by fostering their critical thinking, problem-solving, logical thinking, hand-eye coordination, and fine motor skills.

This Edward the Emu pack contains four sheets of puzzles with real pictures and different number combinations. To prepare them, print all the pages on white cardstock, cut out the strips, and laminate them for durability.

Other Ideas:

Some other activities I can suggest are:

Have the children use mini plastic animals to count and take away, make sets, divide them by sizes and colors, sort the animals by type of species (birds, mammals, and reptiles), and make patterns.

Teach ordinal numbers ( 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, etc.) As you read the book a first or second time, do a recap of the order of appearnac without reading, using pictures, or toy animals. For example, the first is Edward the Emu, the second are the seals, the third are the lions, the fourth are the snakes, and the last one is another emu.

Combine these activities with the ones in my Edward the Emu Literacy pack, to take advantage of this book’s teaching-learning process opportunity. Remember that you should not divorce literacy from math, science, or any other domain for a more comprehensive and complete educational process. They intermingle together and complement each other.

Adding Books to Your Centers

Add more books about emus, seals, lions and snakes to your library and other centers to give children broad learning experiences and variety. These books could be an excellent source of knowledge. Below are some of my favorites. You can find these books at your local library, used book store, and on Amazon. The titles have my affiliate links that will take you directly to the correct Amazon page.

Facts About the Emu by Lisa Strattin is an educational picture book packed with facts about the emu, full color photographs and carefully chosen words to teach children about the iconic Australian animal.

Emu Number Seven by Dawn Rose is a cute counting book about making friends.

Everything You Should Know About Emus by Anne Richards will teach children facts about emus, such as what color they are, how their feathers look like, and how long they have been living in this planet.

Seals! by Hope Aicher is an exciting nonfiction book that features stunning full-color photos and captivating facts about these incredible marine mammals, and reveals the unique adaptations, behaviors, and habitats of seals across the globe.

See What Seal Can Do by Christine Butterworth follows a gray seal on a journey from sand to sea in an engaging, richly illustrated story, merging a lyrical narrative sprinkled with fascinating facts and inspiring illustrations.

Andre the Famous Harbor Seal by Fran Hodgkins tells the story about the special connection that Harry Goodridge from Rockport, Maine, has with a harbor seal pup he named Andre. The two became inseparable, though the seal was free to come and go as he pleased.

All Things Lions for Kids by Animal Reads is a colorful book filled with amazing real-life images aims to combine fun with education to help you learn all about lions.

Lions by Laura Marsh uses beautiful and engaging photos, to teach kids all about these majestic big cats.

Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen is the story about a lion that comes to the library one day, and makes a comfy backrest for the children at story hour. But when something terrible happens, the lion quickly comes to the rescue in the only way he knows how.

All Things About Snakes by Animals Reads is a colorful book filled with amazing real-life images aims to combine fun with education to help you learn all about snakes.

Snakes for Kids: A Junior Scientist’s Guide to Venom, Scales, and Life in the Wild by Michael G. Starkey is filled with fascinating facts and wild photographs that will take you close up to serpents, their habitats and life cycles and their relationships with other animals create balance in the food web and help keep ecosystems healthy.

Oh No! There’s a Snake in the Lake by Adam Ellison is an engaging and educational story that encourages bravery, curiosity, and a love of nature using fun rhyming verses and colorful illustrations to tell the heartwarming adventure of a little girl who learns to face her worries and discovers the wonders of lake life along the way.

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