It is no secret that our house is slightly dinosaur mad.  Most dinosaur related activities are big hits with both my kids so I thought it was time my youngest had a go at some dinosaur maths.

I printed out these free dinosaur footprints from Twinkl and cut them out.  The plan was to use them for some basic addition but before we started our sums my youngest had a go at placing the footprint in the correct order

and he made sure that each footprint had the correct number of dinosaurs or eggs (speckled easter eggs make greater dinosaur eggs) on them.

(If your kids are still working on their number recognition a great activity would be to randomly call out the numbers on the footprints and get them to stand on the correct footprint or do something fun like give number 5 a T-Rex and give number 8 a Stegosaurus.)

Once he was satisfied we started playing around a bit.  First I placed one dinosaur on each footprint and he had to work out how many dinosaur eggs or baby dinosaurs he needed to add.  So for footprint 3 the sum ended up being 1+2 =3

He did some using his dinosaur eggs and he did some using baby dinosaurs and he even repeated a few of them.

He thought this was great.  And ended up doing a lot of sums. We did stick to either adding 1, 2 or 3 at this stage.

At the end he even did some basic subtraction without realising it.  I told him that everyone could get 2 dinosaur eggs to eat.  So he gave his sister two eggs and then he worked out that 7-2 = 5 (once he took the 2 eggs away he only had 5 eggs left).  And 5-2 =3 and then lastly 3-2=1.

I have a feeling our Dinosaur maths is going to be ongoing next week.