Penguin Place Value Printable Activities

It’s already December and only a few weeks away until Christmas! We have been getting into the spirit lately with winter and holiday themed learning activities. Today, I am so excited to share with you some recent printable activities and crafts that I created for my kids inspired by the book, Penguin Place Value, written and illustrated by long time educator, and now also childrens’ book author, Kathleen L. Stone.

Penguin Place Value is a short story told in rhymes about a penguin family who catch fish all day to sell in their store. They have a small tray that can only hold nine fish. When they catch any more, they have to place every ten fish into a box. This simple tale with such cute illustrations very cleverly introduces young learners to the concepts of place value, counting by tens, addition, rhyming, and alliteration.

My kids adore anything with penguins. One of the few places we have been able to enjoy during this pandemic has been the local zoo and their favorite animal there are these one foot tall blue penguins that are actually called little penguins. In short, they loved these themed activities and I appreciated the opportunity that this story provided to give the kids more practice with addition, counting, rhyming, and of course making learning fun.

I made place value mats, a fish counting mat and some themed worksheets, an igloo math craft, a playdough mat, as well as a few more fun learning printables. The author, Kathleen Stone, has graciously allowed me to share these activities I made with you. These are all available for free to download below.

The place value mats are best printed out and laminated for more durability. We then reenacted the story using origami boxes and Swedish fish. My kids love origami so we made many origami boxes to put each ten fish in. They even decorated their boxes to look like the boxes in Mrs. Stone’s illustrations with the labels of Max 10 and FISH. I then placed random numbers in a bowl. The kids would pick out a number, count out the number of fish, putting each fish on the ones side first. When they had more than nine, they started filling up their origami boxes with 10 fish each. In place of origami boxes, you could use little tupperware containers, leftover yogurt containers, or as Mrs. Stone suggests at the end of her book, paper cups. Also if you don’t want to have so much sugar associated with this activity, you can use goldfish crackers. To extend this activity further for my second grader, I created some place value mats that included the hundreds and thousands place value, and had him determine the number of fish in my set up.

This fish counting mat is best printed out and laminated. There are two pages included. The first page is the tray. I placed this on a cupcake tray that I had but you can also use a cookie sheet or leave as is. My daughter liked having the handles to carry her fish around. The second page with the scissor in the upper left hand corner include all the fish that need to be cut out. The pieces can then be attached with adhesive velcro dots for a counting and matching activity. This is similar to how I construct my daughters’ busy books.

This was a hit with my youngest two daughters, ages 1 and 3. My one-year-old loved playing with the different textures and my toddler enjoyed this as an addition to her play kitchen. She spent the morning washing fish (I am from the camp who believes you should never wash your meat). She then seasoned her fish (I give her my empty spice jars) and baked them in her play oven along with some pretend cupcakes. She kept updating me as to how much they had risen and practiced further counting as she divided them onto her siblings’ plates.

This set includes four pages of varying difficulty. I like to print these worksheets out and place them in a laminated pouch to have my kids complete with a dry erase marker. They can revisit this concept again later easily. The first worksheet can be completed by a child who is learning how to count and write their numbers. The second and third page was created with my kindergartener in mind, so she could practice skip counting by 10 and work on her teen numbers. The last page is geared towards first and second grade.

This file is best printed out and placed in a laminated pouch for repeat use with a dry erase marker. Your learner can then label the boxes of fish, skip counting by 10 to 100. Skip counting is a great way for kids to learn how to do mental math more quickly. You can also encourage your kids to waddle from iceberg to iceberg (sheets of white printer paper), skip counting by 10 to reinforce this lesson further.

My kids love to color… so much that they even hum when they color. We color a lot at home. They enjoy color by number, color by sight word, color by multiplication, as well as just coloring their favorite My Little Pony or Star Wars character. I had to count and write out the number by each ten frame for my toddler to match but after that she was able to complete this sheet. Both my kindergartener and second grader were able to complete this sheet without help and gave this activity a thumbs up.

This is a simple math craft that my kids really enjoyed. To make the igloo, just cut a straight line off the bottom of a paper plate, then invert that cut to make a door. Next print the above file, have your kids cut out all the pieces, fold, solve, and glue to their paper plate. In the story there were only five penguin, but as we are a family of six, I included an extra penguin. We placed the parent penguins at the door, guarding the igloo and pasted the little penguins inside. Later, the kids quizzed each other and themselves while playing with it. This is a great activity for kids of all ages. If you have younger kids, instead of these printable ice blocks with tens and ones, you can just have your child glue on small squares “of ice” to count. You can also just fold rectangular pieces of paper and write different types of problems for your kids to solve depending on their level of learning.

This playdough mat file is best printed out and laminated and is just plain fun for open-ended play. This file is part of a larger file that is available in my shop. Help your child create a cute penguin family. Above is our penguin family. My toddler wanted to have all of the penguins hold flippers.

This was a fun activity to get the kids to brainstorm rhyming words. I just printed the page out onto cardstock and handed it over to my kids with glue, scissors, and something to write with. They each picked a different box, wrote rhyming words onto their fish, and then cut and pasted everything together.

I am always on the lookout for more writing activities for my kids. We used the fish printable from our rhyming activity and wrote all the descriptive words we could think of that started with P. The kids then cut everything out, pasted, and hung onto our refrigerator. Then they were given the writing paper to write a story using as many words with the letter P as possible. This was a great spelling and vocabulary activity for my second grader and also provided great reading and writing practice for my kindergartener. My toddler enjoyed coloring her P is for Penguin page as well as the cut and paste part of the activity.

If your child enjoyed these activities, they may also be interested in:

I create and sell more fun and educational printable activities for kids here.

For more about Kathleen Stone, be sure to check out her site at www.kathleenstone.com She also has a free place value mat available for download as well as a fun printable game to go along with her book on her site. Penguin Place Value was her first children’s book. She has since created numerous others. I am going to get Riley the Robot next for my kids.

I hope you enjoy these learning activities inspired by Penguin Place Value. Special thanks to Mrs. Kathleen Stone for creating such a wonderful book and for allowing me to run with her story in creating some learning fun to share.