Milk Caps Math

My three year old loves to play with the growing collection of milk caps and lids. I am planning some sort of mural using the recycled lids, but until then we are getting lots of fun math skills in! So far we have used the milk caps for:

Ladybug Math activity

Milk caps make great math counters for little fingers.

Milk caps make great eyes in art projects.

I have made up a couple of Busy Bags for my kids that have a collection of milk caps with stickers on them to decorate. It's a simple but fun activity when you are waiting in a restaurant!

My older son is becoming a chess fanatic and it's frustrating to my daughter because he's busy and she can't touch the chess pieces. So I brought out a checkers board...and it didn't interest her at all. Then I sat our collection of lids next to the board and VOILA, instant activity. She slowly put the caps onto the board until every space was covered. At times she seemed to be matching the lids by color and size too. What a fun way to practice one-to-one correspondence. 

Later we sorted the collection by color and began to build a simple graph. Big brother stopped by to explain that they had to be lined up just so you could compare the number. She listened attentively and even helped him rearrange the graph. Ahhhhhhhh....I love having his voice in teaching our little girl.