The Kissing Hand Story-related Math Pack for Preschoolers
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Math is everywhere, and it helps children make sense of the world around them and solve problems, including while they play. That is why preschool teachers and parents must provide opportunities for children to do meaningful, fun, and positive math activities to build a foundation for their future, and The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn offers a way to start the school year with hands-on math activities.
I included a FREE 37-page The Kissing Hand Math Pack with nine fun, educational math activities you can use with your preschoolers in your classroom or at home to go along with this story. You can get it at the end of this post.
Benefits of Teaching Math to Preschoolers
Learning Math provides preschoolers with a lot of benefits, such as the development of:
- Creative and critical thinking skills.
- Problem-solving.
- Communication.
- Understanding of patterns, sizes, and shapes.
- Ability to understand the world around them.
The Kissing Hand Math Pack
The Kissing Hand is a sweet story about how a mother raccoon shares a family secret to teach her son that her love will always be with him, no matter where he is. It is also my favorite story to start the school year because I feel that it helps preschoolers feel less stressed or scared when they come to school for the first time, as they identify themselves with Chester, the little raccoon who is afraid to go to school in the story.
There are many math activities you can do using this storybook as a base. Below are just some ideas. To reuse the activities, print the sheets on white cardstock and laminate them or use a dry-erase pocket to protect them. You can also divide the sheets into strips.
The Kissing Hand Memory Game
This game is great for strengthening children’s concentration and memory and for working on one-to-one correspondence and creating sets.
The Kissing Hand Math Pack includes two sheets with a total of 15 cards each, one for each animal that appears in the story, using beautiful pictures. Print each page twice, for each set of the game, using white cardstock. Cut out and laminate the cards to make them last longer.
This game can be played individually or with a partner. Keep it simple: have the children place the cards face down. Each child selects a card at random and tries to match it with its double. The child who matches the most cards wins the game.
The Kissing Hand Visual Discrimination Activities
Preschoolers must develop their visual discrimination to identify and recognize similarities and differences not only in sizes, but also in shapes, letters, numbers, colors, and positions. This essential skill will help them do important activities in life, from knowing how much water a container can hold to the size of space they need to park a car, to say the least.
Size Discrimination
The Kissing Hand Math Pack contains two size discrimination activities, one to circle the larger animal in the row, and the other one to the smaller. Both activities come with two sheets, each with 3 strips, featuring different animals from the story. You can either keep the sheets together or divide the strips.
Recognizing The Different Animal
The Kissing Hand Math Pack includes another activity to help children practice visual discrimination by identifying which animal in the row is different. The pack comes with two sheets with 5 strips each, for a total of 10 different strips. You can either keep the sheets together or divide the strips.
Patterns can be found everywhere, and children must learn to identify them to make predictions, understand what comes next, make logical connections, and develop their reasoning skills.
The Kissing Hand Pattern Activities
Pattern activities also help preschoolers develop their visual discrimination and fine motor skills. The Kissing Hand Math Pack includes three different pattern activities. One to complete the pattern, another one to copy the pattern (both with two sheets of 5 strips of different pattern combinations each), and the last one to create their own pattern. I also included 3 sheets of tiles with 62 different designs to use with these activities.
You can do the same activities using woodland plastic animals. Present a pattern and invite a volunteer to complete it, copy it, or create their own pattern, and try to motivate every child to participate. When you finish the activity, keep the animals available so they can continue creating patterns on their own. Below are great examples of animals you can use.
The Kissing Hand Counting Activity
Counting is an essential skill preschoolers need to learn because it helps them understand the meaning of numbers and is the basis for other number concepts. That is why we must give preschoolers plenty of opportunities to do hands-on counting and number-related activities.
To help them practice this skill, I created a fun game in The Kissing Hand Math Pack that includes 2 sheets of 2 different sets of counting mats and 2 different dice, one with dots and one with numbers.
Since you probably have preschoolers at different levels of development, you can use one of the dice or two of each, depending on how challenging you want to make the activity for a particular preschooler. Of course, you can also use real dice with dots or numbers instead.
You can have one or two students playing this game. To play, each child rolls one or two dice, identifies the number, and covers the same number on their mat. If the number is already covered, the child loses the turn, and the other child rolls the dice. The winner is the child who covers all his/her numbers first.
You can use different manipulatives to cover the numbers like bingo chips, buttons, mini erasers, woodland stampers, or woodland stickers. Just remember that if you use the last two, you probably won’t be able to reuse the activity.
This game is great to practice:
- One-to-one correspondence.
- Number recognition.
- Counting.
- Hand-eye coordination.
- Adding.
The Kissing Hand Number Puzzles
I found such beautiful pictures of these animals that I wanted to use them for number puzzles. The Kissing Hand Math Pack contains 15 sheets, one for each animal in the story, with different number combinations.
Other Raccoon-Related Books
Add more books about raccoons to your library and other centers, to give children a wide learning experience and variety to choose from. 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 right page on Amazon.
- Raccoons! by Hope Aicher. This book is a collection of full-color photos and fun, interesting facts about raccoons.
- Exploring the World of Raccoons by Tracy C. Read. Describes the natural history of these animals and explains how that heritage helps them thrive in cities as well as in fields and woodlands.
- Love You S’More by Melinda Lee Rathjen. In this little book, two competitive raccoons realize that with all that love, everyone wins.
- Kiss Those Toes by Rainstorm Publishing. This sweet, rhyming story follows a group of forest animals as they play hide-and-seek with their children and playfully kiss their toes, noses, cheeks, and bellies when they find them.
- Raccoon on His Own by Jim Arnosky. When a baby raccoon is swept downstream in an abandoned canoe, he feels afraid. But soon he notices all kinds of things he has never seen before, and from the safety of his little boat, he begins to explore the world around him.
Pin It For Later
If you are in a rush and don’t have time to read the post and download the printable but want to save it for later, pin it to one of your Pinterest boards.
You can use these ideas on their own, but I invite you to combine them with the FREE literacy and science activities I created for this beautiful story, The Kissing Hand, to take advantage of the opportunity this book offers. Remember that for a more comprehensive and complete educational process, you should not divorce literacy from math, science, or any other domain. They intermingle together and complement each other.
Don’t forget to download The Kissing Hand Math Pack. Click the button below and enter your information for an immediate download.
Be happy, safe, and creative. I wish you well.
Love,
P.D. Please let me know if you like any of these ideas, or if you think I should add or replace something. My goal is to help you in any way I can, and I don’t like anything better than posting something you might find useful. Also, if you come up with different ideas and want to share them, I would love to post them as well.
