Super Hero Craft for Skip Counting

I have a fun occupational therapy craft to share today. This superhero craft is a SUPER way to help kids develop fine motor skills and hand strength. It’s a clothes pin craft, so when kids make these super hero clothes pins, they are really strengthening hand strength and endurance in the hands.

Add these superhero craft to these superhero activities:

• Superhero Writing
• Super Hero Gross Motor Activities (great for brain breaks)

Super Hero Craft

How to make a super hero craft 

  Making the super heroes are part of the fun with this math activity.  We used a few items to create these super cute super heroes:  

• Wooden clothes pins 
• Various colored card stock 
• Permanent marker 
• Glue 
• White printer paper

1. Cut the card stock into triangle shapes with a flat top.  Measure the size against the length of the clothes pins.  
2. Glue the Triangle to one long side of the wooden clothes pins  with the narrow part of the triangle at the part that pinches.  The “head” of your superhero will be the part that pinches paper.  
3. Cut small rectangles from the card stock to fit the width of the clothes pins.  These will become the superhero’s mask.  
4. Glue the mask onto the clothespin about a 1/4 inch from the top of the clothes pin.  
5. Use a marker or permanent marker to draw a smirk (or angry face, if you like) and eyes on the mask.  

  This super hero craft is ready to fight math crime!

Skip Counting by 1000

You may know that occupational therapists love hands-on learning. We love to seek multisensory learning and activities that kids can move and learn at the same time. This superhero craft does just that.

The school year is about to begin and we will have a second grader in our house.  HOW did that happen?? She loved math in first grade and I’m excited to see her growth and learning this year in second grade.  We do so many enrichment and homework extension activities and it is fun to come up with creative ways to practice what the kids have been learning in school.  

This Super hero Skip Counting Activity was a fun way to practice skip counting and basic addition up to 1000.  (Affiliate links are included in this post).  

For more fine motor math, grab our count and color worksheet to build many visual motor skills.

  Next, we used the printer paper to create strips of paper that became our math skip counting columns.  Simple fold the paper into quarters lengthwise.  Then, use the sharpie to draw ten horizontal lines.  You can draw a picture at the top of the strip of paper, like buildings, stars, a medal, or other superhero-ish pictures.

Multisensory Math- Skip Counting to 1000

We made four strips of paper and my daughter wrote in numbers.  On one strip she wrote 1-10. On the second, she wrote 1-100 by tens.  On the third strip she wrote 5-50 by fives.  On the last strip, she wrote 100-1000 by hundreds.  

We then used the superheros to skip count up to 1000.  

She was able to use the various strips together to do basic adding by 1’s, 5’s, 10’s, and 100’s.  

One of the standards in second grade math is understanding place value.  Skip counting to 1000, and reading and writing numbers up to 1000 are important concepts in place value.  

You can position the hundreds strip next to the ones strip and easily note that the numbers 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, and 900 refer to one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, or ten hundreds (and 0 tens and 0 ones).   There are so many ways to use these superhero skip counting strips and superhero counters.  

My daughter has been using them every day (and carting them around in her tote bag) to count out how many silly band bracelets she’s made.  She will slide the superhero counters up the strips one by one on the ones strip.  

Then when she reaches the 10, she slides the superhero up on the tens strip.  She’s got a long way to go to reach one thousand silly band bracelets, but she sure does have lofty goals (and a super fun superhero way to keep track)!    

These make a great fine motor strengthening activity, too.  Pinch these superheros on yarn or paper for superhero fine motor strength!   Looking for more Superhero themed ways to learn in second grade?  Try these from our Second Grade Blog Team:

Super Hero States of Matter from Look! We’re Learning!   
uperhero Pattern Stones from Rainy Day Mum   
Super Hero Reading Logs from 123 Homeschool 4 Me   

Superhero Contractions Memory Game from School Time Snippets   
Superhero Cityscape Art Project with Van Gogh from Preschool Powol Packets   
Create your own Superhero Comic-Photo-Strip from Crafty Kids at Home   
Super Hero Self Portrait from Still Playing School

More Multi-Sensory Math ideas you may enjoy: 

Flip Flop Math Commutative Property of Addition

How to Add with Regrouping

Play Dough Math Ideas

Bottle Caps in First Grade Math