Fun Tally Marks Activity for Preschool

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Numbers and counting are great skills to work on when your child reaches preschool age. Whenever possible, I like to use hands-on methods to help make numbers into concrete concepts kids can grasp. Once your preschool student has a little bit of basic number sense and can count to twenty, you can introduce this fun tally marks activity with popsicle sticks to help them transition to grouping and adding numbers quickly.

Tally marks are a quick way to keep track as you count. Here’s how tally marks work. For each object counted, a slash mark is drawn on the paper. The slashes are kept in groups of five, and the fifth one of each group crosses the others to show that the group is complete. You can see this in the picture below.

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Tally Marks for Preschool Kids

Tally marks allow adults to keep counting whatever big job they need to count, and then come back and tally up the final totals after the counting job is done. But for kids, tally marks are a way to start sorting, grouping, and organizing the process of counting visually.

One of the great benefits of tally marks is the ability to process a huge number of objects quickly without having to keep track of where you are. For preschool kids, the tally marks help make the concept of skip counting by fives more concrete and demonstrate the speed of skip counting.

How The Activity Works

We’ve taken tallying and turned it into a hands-on and fun tally marks activity. Kids can use popsicle sticks and keep a tally of the numbers on playing cards to practice. For this activity, you can use both a whiteboard and a set of popsicle sticks to keep the tally marks. Using the whiteboard and marker will improve your child’s fine motor skills, but using the popsicle sticks will make the fun tally marks activity a tactile experience. Switching back and forth between the two options will keep things interesting.

You’ll use a deck of cards to create the tally marks. Remember this is your student’s first exposure to tally marks, so for now you are just practicing grouping the marks in sets of five, and making the fifth mark horizontal. Once your child can do this with the number eight or the number ten, you can start adding bigger numbers together and keeping tally marks to get to the final total.

Skip Counting By Five with Tally Marks

Our fun tally marks activity takes the concept of skip counting by five to a whole new level because it shows one of the benefits of skip counting in a very hands-on way. Tally marks in groups of five make it so easy to keep track of what you are counting fast and find the total quickly once everything has been accounted for.

Other Things to Count with Tally Marks

Once your student is easily transposing the numbers on playing cards into tally marks. They can move on to adding up multiple cards using tally marks to make the job easier than straight addition. Then you can try making tally marks as you throw LEGO® bricks in a bucket, put toys away by type, or eating broccoli at lunch. If you like to give treats, you could practice tally marks with little candies. Carry the whiteboard from room to room and find things to count and track. If you are watching a sporting event together, you could even have your child keep tally marks for the score.

Materials for the Fun Tally Marks Activity

• Number Cards 1-10
• 10 popsicle sticks
• whiteboard and marker or paper and pencil

Instructions for the Fun Tally Marks Activity

1. First, shuffle the number cards and place them in a pile face down.
2. Have your learner turn over the top card and identify the number.
3. Then ask your learner to build the number in tally marks with their popsicle sticks.  Remind your learner that we use numbers 5 and 10 to cross the other marks out if needed.
4. Finally, ask your learner to write the number and tally marks on their whiteboard/paper.
5. Repeat with the remaining cards.
6. Once your child is comfortable transposing single numbers into tally marks, have them move on to adding up several cards using the tally marks method.