Christmas Lights Counting Game

Learning to count is fun. But it’s more fun when you’re learning to count with Christmas lights! Kids will love learning to count and recognize written numbers with this fun Christmas lights counting game. The game doesn’t require any prep, which makes it the perfect hands-on activity to try last-minute, or when your printer is broken. Older kids will love this game too, with a bit of modification to make it addition, subtraction, or multiplication. You can also use these lights in a variety of other ways, including sorting them by color and making a graph!

There are several ways to play this game, all based on the child’s age. I was playing it with my preschooler, so we focused on counting.

But with a few adaptations, you can make this an addition, subtraction, or multiplication game!

To play our way, get out all the numbers from 0-9.

Place them in a play tray along with your Christmas lights.

Roll the die and count the dots.

Find that number.

Next, find that number of Christmas lights and place them next to the number.

Roll the dice again, and repeat!

To play another way:

If you have multiple dice, this becomes really fun.

Decide if you are adding, subtracting, or multiplying.

Roll the dice. Add, subtract, or multiply the numbers together.

Use magnetic numbers to write down the answer.

Find that many Christmas lights and put them next to the number.

Another way my preschooler wanted to play with these lights was arranging them by color, then counting how many of each color we had. As she doesn’t normally gravitate to educational activities, I was pretty excited to see her engage with the lights in this way.