Homemade Number Cards

Honestly, I made these homemade number cards out of necessity, not because they’re any fun by themselves. Sometimes it’s hard for kindergarteners to remember the numbers that don’t make any sense. Like why is 11 called eleven and not one-teen? Similarly hard numbers are 12, 13, 15, and 20. I believe in having kids figure things out for themselves instead of, for example, telling them that 20 means twenty. If your child can count, then the answer is on the back of the card. If they don’t know what the written number 11 means, have them count the dots on the back, and they can say, “Oh yeah, one-one is eleven.” Likely they will get tired of doing this and gain a little motivation to memorize the hard numbers. Another reason why I made these cards is so that we could play a number matching game similar to the letter matching game, which kids seem to enjoy.

Recommended Age Range: Preschool, Kindergarten
Time Required: ~2 hours
Difficulty: Easy (though drawing all those dots gets to be a bit of a pain).
Cost: Less than $5 in used supplies.

Materials:

blank index cards
markers
contact paper

Supplies & Tools:

scissors
ruler

Instructions:

Write a number on each of the index cards. I chose to alternate colors and outline the number in black to make it look prettier. I also chose to go up to 30 since that’s how high kindergarteners are expected to recognize in my community.
Draw dots on the back of each index card corresponding to the number on the other side. I think it makes the most sense to draw them in rows of 10, so that the child can start to learn to associate the fact that 23, for example, is two rows of 10 plus 3 extra. To do this easily, I made a reference card as shown below. Since I used 3″x5″ cards, I drew my reference dots 1/2″ apart starting 1/4″ from the edge (so I drew tick marks at 1/4″, 3/4″, 1 and 1/4″, 1 and 3/4″, all the way to 4 and 3/4″)