Free Printable Button Counting Grid Game for Preschool

My daughter loves Pete the Cat. He is her first choice for reading time each day. We’re quickly adding to our collection and we check the library shelves each week when we go for titles that we haven’t read yet. (This week we picked up a collection of seven books, so we’ll be having lots of reading adventures with Pete the Cat!) Her overall favorite is definitely Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons (which she lovingly calls “Pete’s Roovy, Roovy Buttons”!) Since keeping her attention is a bit of a challenge, I made some games that she can play along with our reading time. Some days I read to her while she plays a game and others, we play after we read. This free printable button counting grid game is one of the fun activities we’ve been using.

To Prepare the Button Counting Grid Game: Print the file found below. Laminate the counting grids and the large cube inserts if you choose to use those. To use the printable cube, simply cut on the outside line and fold on the inner lines to form a cube. Tape the edges to hold the cube together. If you choose to use the larger cube inserts, cut apart the dice cards and place them inside the windows of the differentiated instruction cube.

Please note- there are two sets of cube inserts and cubes included. One has the numbers 1-3 twice and the other has the numbers 1-6. I recommend using the 1-3 cube with the counting to 10 game as it will make the game last longer. For the counting to 20 grid, you could use either cube.

How To Use the Button Counting Grid Game: Roll the cube and place that number of buttons on the spaces of the grid. Let your child decide where to place them. There is no right or wrong way to use the grid.

We’ve had fun using the dice alone and counting the leaves and also using the ten-frame by itself to practice counting all the way to 10.

Right now we are working on reinforcing one-to-one correspondence, so I am having Shiloh touch each leaf in the ten-frame and on the dice as she counts them. Otherwise she gets a little ahead of herself and starts counting with ‘2’ instead of ‘1’!

Sometimes she tries to match the colors of the real buttons and the pictures, but I try to let her know they don’t have to match. She’s getting better at it, but it did cause a little frustration at first because we’ve worked so hard on color matching.

Ways you can use the Button Counting Grid Game:

One-to-one correspondence- teaches the child that each button is “1”.

Addition- all of the numbers rolled “add” up to the total number (you can also use 2 dice and add the numbers together on each turn.

Subtraction- start with the counting grid full of buttons. With each roll “subtract” that number of buttons from the grid.