This post was sponsored by Stretch Island as part of an Influencer Activation for Influence Central and all opinions expressed in my post are my own. Learn how math is fun and yummy in this post!
Our “baby” just turned 4 a few weeks ago. It is really hard to believe, but this is a fun age, for sure. Sometimes I think we really do treat him like the baby and we are not teaching him things like we taught the older two boys. He learns a lot from day to day activities, but I noticed he has been asking about numbers and addition multiple times a day here lately. Today in the car he wanted to know what 2 +1 equals because he needed to know how many treats we would need if we needed one push pop for him and two more for his brothers.
It made me realize how important it is to help kids with math through their everyday curiosity and questions.
He has always been really good at one-to-one correspondence, so I thought this fun countdown page with an addition component would be super fun for him. I added in some real fruit bites from Stretch Island as manipulatives and it was a big hit!
Christmas is coming soon and little ones always have trouble visualizing just how far this and other special days are away from the current day. I used Stretch Island fruit strips to cut out numbers and a tree to represent Christmas. I also cut out a birthday cake symbol to symbolize his brother’s birthday!
He was able to pick the numbers out and then count out the correct number of fruit bites to represent the number. We talked about how you can put any number in each circle, as long as it equals the number we want it to equal.
He enjoyed the birthday visual, too! We didn’t have nearly enough fruit bites to see just how many days remain until his next birthday, so we played around with different numbers.
I loved using Stretch Island fruit snacks because not only are they easy to work with as manipulatives, but they are a great snack and it’s totally fine (and expected!) to sneak a few while completing the activity.
Stretch Island Fruit Leathers and Organic Fruit Strips contain 0g added sugar. That’s a big deal in the world of my 4 year old. He LOVES fruit but he also loves sugar, so it’s nice to know that these are available for convenience. Plus, he loves them!
All of the sugar in Stretch Island fruit snacks comes naturally from fruit puree and fruit juice concentrates. These delicious snacks are all made with 100% fruit ingredients and are Non-GMO Project Verified, vegan, and gluten free. The fruit strips and fruit bites are also USDA organic. I love that the ingredients are simple and minimally processed, too.
