Go to a pizza place and ask for a clean empty box, small size is good. You
want it a bit bigger than a paper plate. Now take six or seven paper plates and
color the rim light brown, and the middle orangey-red. These are your pizzas.
The kids can do this part. Next take some colored paper and cut out lots and
lots of mushrooms, pepperoni slices, onion rings, olives and whatever topping
you think you can make a reasonable representation of with just the colored
paper. Stick with four to six toppings. Glue from two or three on up to
seven or eight of each topping on each of your "pizzas." Make a
different number of each topping, like 4 olives, 5 anchovies, 7 onion rings. Now
on the inside of the pizza box lid draw lines across to make enough rows for
each kind of topping. At the left side glue one topping at the beginning of each
row. Write "How many olives?" in the row with the olive picture, etc.
Next to that write the possible answers, such as 2 3 4 5
6 7. Now your child chooses a pizza and places it in the box. She
counts each topping and places a marker on the correct number beside that
topping on the lid. You or an older child can check the work, and your little
one goes on to the next pizza. This game is fun for any child who has learned to
count and will foster rote counting, one to one correspondence, and visual
discrimination in preschoolers.
By kindergarten, the game is getting too easy; but you can make a more
challenging one by getting a large pizza box and a cake circle at a party supply
store to make your pizza. If you cover the cake circle with felt, and make felt
toppings you can use just one pizza and vary the toppings. If you make a couple
of these, and provide aprons, chef hats, and serving trays, kids as old as 8 or
9 enjoy playing restaurant with them. Creating menus, and order pads adds
language arts to the skills you can enhance through this kind of play.
You might want to introduce either of these by making real homemade pizza for
lunch or dinner.
