Feed The Penguin

This is a fun math activity for penguins. 

AGE RANGE

Your child needs to be old enough to be able to count dots and recognize numbers. This will vary greatly from child to child. My 3 year old could do it, as could my 5 year old. 

SKILLS TAUGHT

Counting Skills

PREPARATION

You want to have a penguin with a number on the belly as well as a fish with dots. I Googled "penguin clip art" and choose an image I liked. I then put it into Microsoft Word, copied it 11 times, and ended up with 12 penguins. I then created a text box and typed a number in for each penguin. I made the border and the fill as "no border" and "no fill" so that the box didn't cover up the penguin, then I put the number over each penguin. 

I Googled "fish clip art" and choose a fish that looked like one a penguin would eat. I then copied it and put it into Word and copied it 11 times. I then used the shape tool to draw dots on each fish.

I then printed the documents. I have uploaded two versions of this into my Google Documents. You can click on these Documents for blank Word file of just penguins and just fish. These documents have no numbers and no fish. If you plan to edit, please save it to your computer and edit your own copy. I also saved the exact files I usd in a PDF here:

Fish
Penguins

Then I laminated the pages. I got a laminator for Christmas and I LOVE it. 

I then cut everything out.

ACTIVITY

The idea is to tell your child the penguins are hungry. A number four penguin needs a number four fish to get full. You have your child match the penguins to the fish.

Younger children will do best with starting with numbers 1-5. The higher numbers get hard to count the dots, especially because I made it a little challenging intentionally. That is one reason I provided  you with blank fish so you can make it how you want it. You could also do dots on the penguins and numbers on the fish if you want. 

There are further extensions. If your child needs more of a challenge, you could tell him to feed the penguin two fish to feed it. So a number three penguin would get a two fish and a one fish.

You could also do numbers or dots on the penguins but then just print out blank fish and have  your child feed the penguin the correct number of fish.