34 Pre-K Math Lesson Plans & Activities for Your Teaching Convenience
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Beginning of the Year

Planning a whole year’s worth of math lessons is a big job. Preschoolers are introduced to a wide range of math concepts,

including counting, time and money concepts, patterns, shapes and more. A variety of hands-on activities, literature-based math lessons, song and even crafts will help young children develop a strong foundation for math skills.

Planning for the first few months of school can be stressful. Take the stress out of your math plans with these lesson and activities that are perfect for some popular fall themes. Children will practice counting, sorting, matching and even measuring with these fun lesson plans that go with themes for apples, pumpkins and more.

Counting

Counting is one of the skills preschoolers will learn the most and spend quite a bit of time working on. When children enter preschool, they will have a wide variety of experiences with counting and numbers. Provide them with lots of opportunities for counting practice through books, songs, games and other activities. Hands-on counting activities will help children develop one-to-one correspondence as they count sets of objects. Use these lesson plan ideas to help your students build a strong foundation for counting.

Sorting

Learning to sort and classify objects can be a tricky task for young children. They may be able to recognize that an object can be grouped by one property like by color, but it may be harder for them to see other groups that the same object can belong too. A child may easily place a blue marble into a group of blue objects, but he may not realize that it could belong to several groups, such as round things, small things and hard things. Lots of hands-on experience sorting and classifying different types of objects will help children develop this skill. Here you will find ideas for a variety of sorting activities from very simple to more complicated.

Time and Money

Introduce your preschoolers to the concepts of time and money with some of these lesson plan ideas.

Young children have a very basic understanding of money. Most children know that we earn money by working and then use it to buy things. Preschoolers are also beginning to recognize dollars and coins and may be familiar with the names of the coins, though they probably don’t know their exact values.

The concept of time is very difficult for young children to understand. Preschoolers are not expected to be able to tell time until they are older, but they can begin to understand that clocks tell us what time it is. Lessons that help preschool children become familiar with the parts of a clock are also helpful. Learning about time also includes sequencing, calendars and the passage of time. Try some of these lesson plans to help your preschoolers with this challenging concept.

Patterns and Shapes

In preschool, children begin to recognize and name shapes. They will learn the basic characteristics of different shapes, like squares, circles and triangles, and even begin to draw shapes. Reading books, singing songs and making shape-themed crafts are a few ways to help students with this concept. Preschool children will also begin to recognize and make patterns in math class. These lesson plans are perfect for teaching your preschoolers about patterns and shapes.

Themed Math Lessons

If you need a lesson plan to go with a specific theme or unit, look no further. Here you’ll find holiday math lessons as well as ideas for teaching popular preschool themes like oceans, transportation and animals. Children will especially love these math activities that go with the themes they are studying.

With these fun lesson plans and activities, you may find that math is your preschoolers’ favorite time of the day. If you have any to share, please feel free to comment below.

References

  • Hamilton, Darlene Softly and Flemming, Bonnie Mack. Resources for Creative Teaching in Early Childhood Education. Harcourt Brace, 1990