Number Sequence (What's the Missing Number?)

Lights lights everywhere! Christmastime offers up so many beautiful lights whether hanging them or admiring them.  Personally, for me, I can't get enough of them as they are so pretty.  The lights inspired me to do this activity.

We do a fair amount of number writing in our homeschool preschool but we haven't done too much in the way of number sequence.  Here's what we did:

I had some color coding labels that happened to include the colors red and green, perfect for Christmastime!

I cut out shapes of light bulbs, drew a line on a large piece of white paper, stuck on the 'lights' and wrote numbers 1-12 leaving every other light blank for my 4 year old to fill in.

My daughter immediately got to work!

When we do an activity I never know for sure what will grab my daughter's attention.  With this particular activity my 4 year old took to it immediately.  Their was almost no explaining, after seeing it she knew exactly what she needed to do.  She seen number 1 and when she went to count the next 'light' her exact words were, "uh-oh!"  She knew the next number was missing, grabbed the marker and quickly began filling in the rest of the missing numbers.  We were done in a minute and she was asking to do it again, yay (and nay)!  Love when that happens but unfortunately, I didn't have another one prepared, so........my daughter flipped over the paper and made her own version of number sequencing!

Materials needed:
Red and green labels or construction paper
Large white piece of paper
Black permanent marker

The most time consuming part was cutting out the labels to resemble lights but other than that it's super easy and a fun way to teach number sequence.  I also thought you could make this more of a craft by making the 'lights' using your child's fingerprints!!