There are few things my kids love more than watching goldfish swimming in a pond, and that is the inspiration behind these Goldfish Counting Activities. These activities work by using goldfish as manipulatives, and you can use paper goldfish or the delicious cracker kind. The goldfish crackers are a huge hit at my house. Unfortunately, the kids went on a cracker binge the last time I brought them home from Costco, so we made do with some paper ones today.

Goldfish Counting Activity with Ducks

I started the first activity by cutting out small pond shapes from blue paper. This would be a fun cutting exercise for your preschooler or you can do it yourself. They’re ponds, so they don’t have to be uniform shapes, and you can have a bit of fun with it. Then I cut out a lot of small fish from an orange sheet of paper. We drew little faces on the goldfish to give them a bit of personality. For some reason that seemed important at the time, but I’m pretty sure the activity still work without that step. 😉 Then I counted different numbers of goldfish into the ponds.

The last time I was at Walmart, I found a small bag of adorable rubber ducks in the party favor isle. Rubber duckies are the BEST, and I knew they were perfect for learning activities with my littles. I attached a circle label sticker to the bottom of each duck and wrote a number on it to correspond with one of the fish ponds. Then my son got to come in and pick up each duck, look at it’s number, and place it in the correct pond. He had the best time with it, and we got some great counting practice in.

Goldfish Counting Activity #2

I wanted to do a bit more counting practice, so I flipped the ponds over and wrote numbers on them. We put all of our goldfish in a pile, and then he got to count the goldfish into the piles. He enjoyed this activity as well, particularly when he got to count his favorite numbers.

I’m excited to use this activity again, and since I did most of it in paper, it is going to go in a Ziplock bag in the school cupboard to pull out on another day. I hope you enjoyed these Goldfish Counting Activities, and if you happen by Costco today, bring me back a box of goldfish, will you? 😉