Week 23: Learning Math with Count On It

This game is one of my family’s favorites.  It’s surprisingly fun, even for the adults!  It’s like watching for VW bugs, but you can pick what things you watch for, and there are hundreds of images to choose from on The Trip Clip website.

The game is easy – you watch out the window for the items on the list, and each time you see one, you color in another box for that item.

What’s great, though, is that it’s not only fun, but it accomplishes all sorts of good things:

• Your kids can learn while they’re on summer vacation, or even just while running errands around town.
• They’ll spend time interacting with the family in the car instead of staring at a screen.
• They will practice some simple graphing skills.
• Very young kids can practice their counting skills and numeric sense – having the number below each box, and seeing the colored line grow, are both great ways to demonstrate the meaning of numbers and adding by one.
• You can also use it to teach a little probability – ask your kids to make a guess about which things they’ll see the most often. Then talk afterward about whether or not they were right, and why that might be.

I like to customize this activity based on the trip we’re taking, and how likely it is that we will see different kinds of things – we’ll watch for bike riders if we’re just running errands around town, but if we’re going on a longer trip, we might watch for horses or bridges.

Once we’ve picked the set of items we’ll watch for, we make predictions about which items we’ll see the most often on our trip. It turns it into a little mini competition, which my kids love.

This activity works great with a clipboard you can keep handy in the car – like this one from The Trip Clip!