The game Find This Many is like the scavenger hunt version of How Many?. Instead of asking the open-ended, how many?, you can ask kids to find a specific quantity or value.

When playing with toddlers and preschool kids, for the image above, I might say: I see two stuffed animals. Can you find two of anything?

They might answer:

Two giraffes

Two elephants

Two sets of baby and mommy animals

You can keep this going by changing out the quantities and incorporating the early math concepts of position, size, and shape. (For example: I see three large plastic animals, I see four small plastic animals, I see lots of wooden stars up high.)

The video from the How-to page demonstrates how this game might go with kids (videos on the How-to page are also now available in Spanish):

Like any of these math games, you can play this game looking at anything around you, but if you want some fun images to challenge your kids’ counting prowess, check out the Idea Gallery and click on the “Find This Many” button.

Find This Many is also a great game for older kids. To adapt it to a more advanced level, you can have kids look for fractions, negative numbers, and quantitative phrases like not enough and too many.

Math educator and author Christopher Danielson has a printable version of Find This Many called The Number Game that he distributes in his Math-on-a-Stick booth at the Minnesota State Fair. With his permission, we’ve adapted The Number Game for our own printables. This printable version is handy if you want kids to keep track of their findings and return them for a prize or math credit. We’ve got them in English and Spanish for older and younger kids.

It’s always fun to see how creative kids can get with their lists. When my daughter was four we played The Number Game together at a Public Math Day event in Portland. It didn’t take her long to realize that larger numbers are composed of smaller numbers, so she just found a large group of objects and wanted to answer that for every lower number! I decided to take her ‘cheating’ as a math win, since it showed her understanding of the counting concept.