We made it! Today is Day 31 of our 31 Days of Outdoor Activities for Toddlers series! For today’s activity we did some Outdoor Slider Counting using a mock abacus that we hung outside on our fence. This is something we will keep up for a while for Little Sister to play with while she is outside. I thought this was sort a lame way to end our awesome series…but Little Sister was surprisingly pleased playing with it!

We have used pool noodles as manipulatives many times before. I really want to someday build a giant abacus using PVC but we didn’t have time to do that this time so we did something much simpler. This activity is great for reinforcing one-to-one correspondence, rote counting, and a little color recognition too!

Supplies for our Outdoor Slider Counting Activity

Dowel Rod

Pool Noodles

Rope

1. Take your pool noodles and slice them in discs that are 2 1/2 inches or so. We already had our pool noodles sliced for this threading activity we did last year.

2. Place 10 pool noodle “discs” onto the dowel rod and hang by tying the two ends with rope onto a fence (or between trees). Right when we went outside, we started to get a couple sprinkles on our faces so Little Sister was checking out the sky. :)

3. Let your child get started counting and sliding!

When we were finished, I just shut the gate and looped the dowel rod over the backside of the fence gate (to keep our dog from eating the pool noodles). :)