Some days you just need a no prep, high engagement activity, am I right? Enter printing on post it notes! When you want to do a quick activity but don't want to take the time to print, laminate, cut and tape, just print on a sticky note. Easy peasy! If you've never printed on Post It Notes before there are several tutorials out there such as
THIS ONE from First Grade Stripes or
THIS ONE from The Inspired Apple both of which have cute freebies to go along with their tutorials. I printed some shamrock coins with the numbers 1-20 on them so my daughter could practice some seasonal number sequencing practice.
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To start, you will need your
bright yellow sticky notes for the coins. I printed out a template that had a 3x3 square to show me where each sticky note needed to go.
Once I covered up each square with a sticky note, I did a test in my printer. With
my printer, I needed to put the page with sticky notes face down in order to get it to print correctly. Since it will only print 6 sticky notes at a time you can either print out multiple copies of the template and get them all prepared to print all of the pages at once, or just use one template and print those six, remove the sticky notes and do it again.
Once I had all the numbers printed, I peeled them off and stuck them around the house at my daughter's eye level. This was on of the best parts about using sticky notes - I could move them where I wanted, no need to worry about peeling paint or using tape. So easy!
I stuck them on walls, on the windows, on doors and on counters all throughout the lower level of our house. I made sure to mix up the order so that they were not by the number that came before or after.
Once I had all the numbers stuck around the house, I just left them there and waited for my daughter to ask what they were for. I explained that she would need to go around the house and find the number and stick them on the wall in order from 1-20.
She found a blank one and decided that would be 0 so she wanted to start there. She easily blew through the single digit numbers putting them in numerical order.
I was surprised that she went one number at a time and searched around the house for the number that was next. When I was designing it, I was thinking she would go grab all of the sticky notes first and then try to put them in order on the wall.
She slowed down and got stuck at the teens. I showed her the pattern that they all started with 1 and then the second number went up by one 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 etc. She always wants 20 to be 12 for some reason.
Extension Activities:
-Practice sequencing numbers 1-30
-Practice counting backward
-Remove a number and have students guess what number is missing
-Ask questions like 'what comes before the number 12' or 'what comes after the number 18"
-Do some basic addition and subtraction using the sticky note number line to count on and count back
-Stick a number on a blank piece of paper. Have students draw objects to match that number.
-Stick a number on a desk. Have students count out objects to match that number.
There are so many different ways you can use this simple activity. Just keep playing until the sticky notes aren't sticky anymore.
Would you like to try this out? I've got the sticky note template and the coins available for free. Numbers 1-30 are included. Just click the button below to download.
