The Imagination Tree

Creative play and learning for kids

Bottle Top Count and Match Game

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Here’s a fun way to re-use bottle tops and jar lids by turning them into a simple counting and sorting game for preschoolers!
As part of our on-going Playful Maths series, Debs from Learn with Play at Home and I are looking at simple and fun ways to bring maths alive for young children, using everyday and recycled materials. This week we are up cycling bottle tops into fun activities and you can see her excellent Bottle Top Calculator here.
For our activity we collected a selection of lids of different colours and sizes and found an old shoe box lid and some coloured marker pens. We found a way to fit them all into the box and then I drew around each bottle top and coloured in the circles with the matching colours. We used some numeral stickers to match up the each bottle top with its corresponding colour silhouette and then I simply handed the lids to Pop to play with!
She loved having a game all to herself and was really quick to start matching the lids by colour and size. She had to correct herself a couple of times where the colours were fairly similar and she wasn’t initially looking at the numeral stickers as a guide. When she noticed that they needed to be the same, she was able to match those together and name some of them too.
We played a couple of extra games too, where I called out a number and she had to locate it quickly, lining up the tops in numerical order and comparing the lids by size to see which were larger, smaller and the same size. Plenty of learning in one simple game, and adaptable for different abilities too!
What they are learning as they play:
maths: recognising shapes, recognising numerals, matching by colour, shape and numeral, ordering by size, ordering by numerical value
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  12. Maritza says

    I’m into preschool home schooling with my two year old toddler and I’ve been into collecting caps for counting lately. Great activity, I’m planning to use it tomorrow. Great post!

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