Dr. Seuss Math Activities for the Classroom

Just because Dr. Seuss is celebrated with reading, doesn’t mean you can’t add a Seuss spin to other classroom activities. There are lots of great math games and activity ideas out there! Here are a few easy ones to check out for Seuss week and beyond.

Ten Apples Up On Top is a classic book to pair with easy math, and Learning Here N There has an easy activity based on it using a felt board. Or you can make apple blocks to stack and count as you read the story, like these from What We Can Do with Paper and Glue. If you don’t have bulletin board apples handy, you could find an apple printable to cut out and color for this purpose.

Using dot markers to decorate a red fish and blue fish isn’t necessarily a math activity, but it’s an easy thing to count the dots as you mark them or count how many dots are on each fish after you color them. Get the printables from The Resourceful Mama.

These Cat in the Hat math mats are colorful and fun. There are sheets for rolling dice, adding the numbers and covering up the solution on the hat, as well as one where you can make patterns with red and white pompoms, buttons, colored beans or other objects. Grab these from JDaniel4’s Mom.

Upcycle an egg carton and make an art project into math with this Yertle the Turtle math activity from There’s Just One Mommy.

Speaking of combining crafts and math, grab some craft sticks to make simple math manipulatives like these from Lalymom. You can punch stars to add to the ends for counting, pattern making and other activities, or you can draw shapes on the ends or use stickers. You could also make shapes or letters with the sticks and then count the number of stars or marks on them. Or just see what your child does with them!

When my daughter was younger I would spend a lot of time trying to come up with activities she could do in the car on long road trips and things to entertain her when we were waiting at restaurants and things that didn’t involve screens.

But it turns out there are a lot of great activities you can do with just a piece of paper and a pen.

What Do We Do All Day has a great collection of pen and paper games, including some that can be done with just one person, though they’re all more fun if you have at least two.

There are some classics on here like hangman and dots and boxes, but there are also quite a few I hadn’t heard of before.

I don’t want to spoil the whole list for you because you should definitely click over there and look around, but I will share about the one that you see pictured above.

This game is called Bridges, and you start by making the big random shape and the dividing it into a bunch of sections (the post says 30-50 sections is ideal but I think this one is smaller than that).

Each player gets their own color marker and you take turns drawing bridges from one space to another, crossing a third. Once there’s a bridge, no other bridges can start, end or cross in those spaces. Keep going until no more bridges can be built, and the person who makes the last bridge wins.

Check out the post over at What We Do All Day for more great ideas for no or almost-no prep games you can play with your kids or that kids can play together. I’d love to know if you have a favorite paper and pen game, whether it’s on this list or a different one.

[Photo: What We Do All Day]

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