An iPad Counting Activity for Preschool and Kindergarten

We recently added some creativity based apps to our classroom iPads. One of the apps I was most excited to try out was iDiary for Kids. This is an app that is designed for journaling for kids. We’ve used it that way, but I was also excited to expand its use a little bit. One feature that the kids were really excited about was the stamp feature. I decided to use the stamps to adapt an iPad lesson I’d seen on another website.

I created a stack of cards 11-20 for each child. You can download a copy of the number cards here. (I was very particular about the font I chose to make the numbers. Anyone who’s ever watched a preschooler or beginning writer painstakingly try to copy the serif on numbers and letters knows how important it is to find the right font when you’re asking children to copy.) The children drew a number card, copied the number onto their iPad and then used the stamp feature to create that many stamps. We gave each child a number line to help them check their counting.

The activity worked well. I had to adapt it in a couple of ways. The biggest obstacle was that, to the best of my knowledge, iDiary only allows the child to fill 3 pages for each day. Since I wanted the children to fill 10 pages, we quickly ran out of pages. Fortunately, we found a quick fix. We just jumped ahead to the next day when we filled a page. Since our students only use iPads every other day, this worked well. If anyone reading this has used iDiary and has found a way to fill more than 3 pages on a single date, I’d love to hear about it.

I also had to adapt the lesson for some of my students that just haven’t been able to get their minds around the teens. While most of my students loved the activity and were incredibly successful, some of my students struggled. Trying to stamp something 17 times pushed them into shutdown mode and I found them staring at their iPad screens, bewildered. Once we made a second set of number cards that were 1-10 they were just as thrilled to be counting on the iPads as the rest of the kids. Both sets of numbers are available on my printable download.

We all really enjoyed using iDiary in this way. Those stamps were fun!

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