Magic Bean Counting: Finding Combinations of Ten

Magic Bean Counting: Finding Combinations of Ten

I’m back with another easy math activity to practice numbers within ten! This time, the focus is on finding combinations of ten.

*You can easily change this to combinations of five if you need to work up to ten or have a younger child.

We call it “Magic Bean Counting” and Fitz got so good finding combinations of ten the more we played. Okay, so there’s nothing really “magic” about the beans, but we had just read Jack and the Beanstalk and it was a fun connection to make!

What You Need:

Playing cards (I pulled out numbers 1-10 and spread them out on the table)
10 Dry beans (or other small items)
Two small bowls
Work mat (I just made this on a piece of paper – see image above!)

How to Play:

After Fitz counted out his ten magic beans, I told him to put a card on one of the placeholders on our work mat. Then he put a matching number of beans in the first bowl.

The next task was to put the remaining number of beans in the second bowl and find a playing card with the corresponding number.

That’s it! Once they figure it out, they can stack cards on top of each other, and keep moving the beans around until they have used up all of the cards.

Ways to extend or adapt:

You can make this activity more of a game by taking turns picking the first card and challenging your partner to figure out the second number!
For younger children (Fitz is almost 5 and going into Kindergarten), you can just make combinations of 5.
Ask your child to read the math sentence they made for each combination (4 + 6 = 10).
Find combinations of other numbers simply changing the card you put on the end and the number of magic beans.