Math for Kids using checkers
a few times a week. It’s always a hit when we need a little down time or quiet game. We’ve been using my husband’s old checkerboard from his younger days, so it’s a game that we’ve always had around the house. Recently, we’ve been using the game pieces in math activities with my preschoolers and school-aged kids.
The bright and bold colors of the checkers pieces makes them a great patterning tool. Preschool-aged kids can practice AB, ABA, ABB, BAA, and more complicated patterns. Patterning is a skill needed in coding, so this is a great beginning skill to develop.
Ask your preschoolers to sort the colors into stacks and piles of red and black chips. Manipulating the chips really can be challenging to a child’s fine motor skills. Be sure to read up on our manipulating coins fine motor post for information on in-hand manipulation, translation, stacking with coins and chips.
Work on counting with the chips. Count them out into columns of tens. Practice counting by base ten and and adding ones to get double digits. Remove single chips to practice subtraction from double digits.
Pre-Coding Activity for Kids with Checkers
Robot Turtles Game
Color Code
LightUp Edison Kit
Dash & Dot Robot
for their bright colors.
and have the kids snip little 2 inch pieces. This is fabulous scissor practice. Holding the wiggly yarn while snipping sections encourages bilateral hand coordination that is needed for managing paper and scissors while cutting shapes from paper and worksheets.
, encouraging 1:1 correspondence. Counting items is an important preschool math concept that is used in addition and subtraction in later grades. My first grader often uses counting manipulates as a technique for adding multiple digit addition/subtraction problems and counting too quickly can lead to errors. 
