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This post has been co-written with Ben Wolfson, a full-time educator and assistant principal in the USA.
This dinosaur theme counting tally marks 1 to 20 activity will hook your students with the different dinosaur images (expect to be told the name of the dinosaur on each page!) and will help them practice their subitizing skills all year long. While there’s evidence of humans using tally marks going back over 30,000 years, no one has found them on dinosaur bones. This doesn’t stop kindergarten students being fascinated by the ancient lizards, or being engaged by any math activities that have dinosaurs on them.
The Importance of Tally Marks 1 to 20
When you start your lesson with the question “how do you write tally marks?”, many students will ask why you don’t just write the numbers. Tally marks are an essential tool for representing numbers in different ways, and students who develop alternative number representation skills have a much better number sense moving forwards. Being able to write tally marks 1 to 20 also helps your kindergarten students build their subitizing skills: the ability to see a group of objects and instantly know how many there are in the group.
Preparing Your Dinosaur Theme Tally Mark Counting Activity
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Counting Tally Marks in the Classroom
This dinosaur theme math packet makes for a perfect center to help your students count tally marks 1 to 20. As with all kindergarten math activities, you’ll need to teach the strategy of counting tally marks in groups of 5 first to the whole class before you ask them to complete the packet independently. To extend this center, try some of these activities:
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Play “war” – if you print a set of the cards 4 to a page, you can make a small deck of cards to play with. Give each student a stack of uncompleted cards and have them all turn over the top card in the deck at the same time. They then have to quickly work out a) how many bones are on each card and b) who has the greatest number. The student with the greatest number gets the cards from that round and you keep playing till one student has all the cards.
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Sort the deck – you can practice the essential skills of more and less by having students complete the packet and then sorting the cards in numerical order. You could also have students put the entire deck out in front of them, and then call a number at random. They then have to pick the number of tally marks that is one more or one less than the number that you called.
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Dig and count – finally, take your math center to the next level by having a sand table with up to 20 plastic dinosaurs buried in the sand. Students have 20 seconds to find as many dinosaurs as they can, marking each one that they find with a tally mark. Once the timer is up, they can then count their own tally marks.