- plastic gloves
- 1 bag of mixed beans
- rubber bands
- Measuring spoon (Tablespoon size)
Directions for Making Counting Hands:
- Use a tablespoon sized measuring spoon to scoop the beans into the gloves. You may need someone to hold open the gloves for you so the beans won’t spill all over the table.
- Lay the gloves filled with beans on the table and make sure that the gloves will lay flat. You don’t want to overfill them.
- Hold the wrist end of the gloves closed and loop a rubber band around it. Don’t wrap the rubber band to tightly just yet.
- You will need to test out the fingers to make sure that they will be able to be folded backwards when you are trying to count. You don’t want them to be too floppy or too rigid. When you have them just as you want them, make sure the rubber bands are looped tightly.
Let’s Explore Addition
Now that you have the counting hands made you can work on adding with them. We put our hands on a black work mat and took out some dice with dots. (Dots are easier for children to add with then dice with numbers, but dice with numbers will help children visualize math facts as they will see them in their math books.)
JDaniel is just learning to add at school. We have used math tools with plus and equal signs, but for this activity we didn’t use them. We just rolled the dice. Then we bent down the correct number of fingers and added up the bent fingers on each hand.
Additional Ways to Use the Counting Hands
- If you like the idea of a plus sign and equal sign, you could use the hands on a white board or chalkboard. You could just draw them on the black work mat if you wanted to with white crayon or chalk. Adding the symbols will help kids see this math activity as more like a real math equations.
- These hands could easily be used for working on subtracting or the nines table in multiplication.
- You could place plastic rings on the odd or even number fingers of the hands.
- Another math activity you can do with the counting hands is count by twos. Children can easily push the fingers together into pairs and count by twos.
If you like this math activity, here are some more you might like:
Roll and Cover Ocean Animal Mats
Free Printable Interactive Math Mats
What other math activities can you think of to do with the counting hands?
Disclaimer: We used gloves that are rather thin. You may want to put one pair of gloves into another to make them thicker. It will make the beans harder to see, but may keep the beans in the gloves.
