These are some ideas I found off the top of my head (and I'm not quite sure who to reference):
Large Craft Sticks/Beans:
Lay out ten craft sticks. count out 55 beans, glue one bean onto the first craft stick, two on the next and so on to make ten counting sticks. Another variation may be just to mark them with colored dots. You can use these later to teach the kids how to count by 2s, 5s and 10s. Just create additional craft sticks that combine the beans (or dots) into groups.
Various Forms of Dry Pasta:
Children may sort dry, dyed pasta by color, by size, by shape, and by type!
Large, Fuzzy Dice: (ones that hang from rear view mirrors)
Remove the strings from the dice. Encourage children to roll the dice and count the dots to learn their respective values. Once they can identify their values by sight use the dice to practice addition and multiplication! (I saw these at the dollar store a few days ago...I plan to buy 3 or 4 sets!)
Salt Dough:
Pre-make, cover and refrigerate the salt dough (2 cups all-purpose flour, 1 cup salt, 1 cup cold water, added gradually). Have the kids use a small circular shape or cookie cutter to create round "counters." Let them air dry for a couple of days or place in a 200 degree oven covered loosely with foil until baked through. Paint with acryllic paint!
For older kids learning about "ones, tens, and hundreds" create a rectangular grid on a piece of paper or cardstock, designating each "place" appropriately. Have the kids stack the circular counters in each place to create a number. For example: the number 21 would have two counters in the tens place and one counter in the ones place!
(Sometimes the baking process causes the dough to bubble up. On the other hand air dried dough can be more fragile.)
These are ideas I got from ProTeacher.net:
Painted Lima Beans:
Spray paint large lima beans on one side. When dry, you give the children 7 beans or whatever fact family you are working on at the time. They shake the beans and write the addition family that goes with the result. For example, when they shake and roll out their 7 beans, they may get 3 red and 4 white so they would write 3+4=7.These could also be used as counters or with a BINGO game.
(For a Pre-K adaptation of this game just have the kiddos count the colored beans and sort them by color.)
Craft Foam:
I used the colorful craft foam sheets found at stores like Michaels and Hobby Lobby. You can cut it on school paper cutters. I make number tiles, tangrams, and counters.
Milk Caps:
Collect milk caps. Different colors. You know there is one color for skim milk and another for whole milk etc. ( even the tea jugs have colored caps as well as orange juice ) Get friends to save. You can use them for counters, making patterns. If you have the flat ones you can put a magnet on them to be used on a magnet board. Activity show the flash card and the student puts the answer down with the number of caps. Even is the caps as money exchange, write numbers on them for younger grades to put the number in order or the older ones to X with.You can use them to make a bar/pic/graph. There are so many ways to use them and so simple.
Reference: http://www.proteacher.net/discussions/showthread.php?t=69295
