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This post has been co-written with Ben Wolfson, a full-time educator and assistant principal in the USA.
A visit to your local farm is an essential fall field trip for your kindergarten class. There’s so much to do, from talking about where their food comes from to having taste tests of seasonal produce and encouraging healthy eating habits. You’ll also come across a variety of different ways that farmers use to keep birds and pests away from their crops, and you’ll likely see some sort of scarecrow on your trip. These scarecrow number tracing strips are great to bring your students back into your classroom, and you can add to this fall themed number practice center by having your students make their own mini-scarecrows to motivate them.
The Importance of Tracing Numbers 0 to 10
The early part of your kindergarten year should be spent making sure your students have mastered the basic skills in literacy and math that will help them progress in the rest of the year. In math, this should center around one to one correspondence (the concept of each number word corresponding to a countable set of objects) and accurate number formation. The key to this skill is multiple opportunities for practice, and these scarecrow number tracing strips are a great way to link your classroom theme with your math centers. Practicing tracing numbers 0 to 10 helps to develop fine motor control as well as associating numbers with the number words.
Preparing Scarecrow Number Tracing Strips
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Extension Activities For Scarecrow Number Tracing Strips
The idea behind this fall themed number practice center is easy. Students pick a number to work on and then trace over the blank numbers, with the option to color the numbers and the scarecrow once they’re done. To get more out of this set, try some of these extension scarecrow activities for kindergarten:
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Mix the numbers – these scarecrow number tracing strips have four practice opportunities with the same number each time. Change it up by cutting each strip up and laminating it for repeated use. You can then either give students a bowl of individual tracing numbers 0 to 10, hide them in your sandbox for some digging fun, or turn it into a treasure hunt around your classroom or your outdoor space. Adding these elements fun and mixing up the numbers will help students commit the correct number formation to memory.
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Use different media – this scarecrow number formation activity is obviously targeted at pencil or marker work, but you could introduce different media to help them think about the shape that each digit makes. Print the scarecrow number tracing strips a little larger and have students use tweezers to place small objects like pompoms or mini erasers in the correct shape, or have students roll out playdough to form each letter.
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Independent writing – the goal of all of these scarecrow activities for kindergarten is to help students be able to write each number correctly by themselves. After each of the tracing activities, have students try to write each number by themselves independently. Keep all of these writing samples on display so that students can see their own progress and can identify when their written numbers match the tracing pages.