Butterfly Counting Mat

Counting mats are a fantastic way to build early math skills in your preschool classroom. Not only will students be learning key math foundations such as addition and subtraction, but they will be having fun while doing so! This free printable Butterfly Math Mat will help spark a love of learning with your students.

You can use our learning mats with any “counter” such as small coins, beans, noodles etc… However, we recommend adding a little thematic flair if it’s in the budget. For example, using these fun butterfly mini-erasers makes this activity extra special for your students. There are lots of mini-erasers out there at teacher supply stores and the like. But sometimes tracking them all down can be a hassle.

Fine Motor Manipulatives

We recently found an amazing assortment of pencil topper mini-erasers online. This set is sort of like the “grab-bag” of mini-erasers because when you order you get a pack of 50 random designs. We ordered two packs, just to be sure to get enouch of each design to use for counters and other hands-on activities.

With “random” in the product description, I was a little worried we woudl end up with not much of an assortment, but I was happily surprised. Here is a look at the selection we ended up with. We ended up with Hearts, candies, lollipops, soccerballs, emojies, bunnies, rainbow hearts, pandas, bears, two kinds of flowers, foxes, butterflies, piggies, frogs, a ton of bananas, turtles, hamburgers, swanky cats, polarbears, and purple hearts.

Needless to say, this was a fantastic purchase and stocked my fine motor manipulative shelf quite quickly. You can find these specific Mini-Erasers here, but do note the assortment and designs might have changed since the time of this posting.

Anyway, back to the butterflies. This set came with some adorable butterflies that make the perfect counters for our free butterfly math mat. The mat covers addition and subtraction equations for students to fill in the addends to make sentences.

There are a few ways to report the answers to these equtions. The first, is that you can have the student use counters for the answers as well. (Just have them place three butterflies in the rainbow box for the answer. The second option is that you place the learnign mat into a page protector, and have students write their answer with dry erase marker. The third option is to have students write the entire equation on a separate sheet of paper to turn in.

However you decide to use this learning mat, this activity is sure to be a hit with your students.