Try a Christmas Tree Addition Match activity for your big kid – it’s pretty perfect!

Dot stickers and Christmas activities… could there be a more perfect union? I’m absolutely obsessed with using dot stickers for holiday activities and hello, Christmas Tree Addition Match for keeping dot stickers relevant with the 7-year-old crowd.

RELATED: Looking for even more Christmas Activities? Check out my list!

It will always comes back to dot stickers for me

There truly is no activity supply that I love more than a dot sticker – they’ve always been these precious gems of sticky goodness that I can find unlimited uses for.

I’ve used them before in a dot sticker Christmas activity (it was a fabulous number match) and also as a color match here – but I wanted something a little more challenging for my first grader.

RELATED: Do you need some big kid activities? I have a whole collection of them!

I was also really inspired by my friend Fynn from Happy Tot Shelf’s Christmas Tree Activities – she has so many awesome Christmas tree + dot sticker ideas too!

Making a Christmas Tree Addition Match activity was the perfect idea!

I decided to set up an addition version for my 7-year-old. This is a great activity for grade school kids who have the following skills:

• Full understanding of the process of addition
• Understanding and application of number sentences
• Ability to do addition facts to 24

This specific activity is geared at first grade students working on the Common Core State Standard:

Remember, this is an activity to PRACTICE addition, not learn it

This activity isn’t helping my son learn what addition is or how to use addition. He knows that. He learned about WHAT addition is in other activities (like this one).

Christmas Tree Addition Match is about rapid recall of math facts and math sums – it is NOT about learning how to add.

Activities like this are a great way to PRACTICE skills and solidify them, but only after teaching has happened.

Here’s how to set up this easy Christmas Tree Addition Match:

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I took my 12×18 inch construction paper and drew a Christmas tree on it. I used a ruler to make mine so straight – since I was putting photos of this on the Internet, I decided to really go for even. Normally… well, normally this would have been a hot mess tree instead of this symmetrical beauty.

I made strands on the tree – for our numbered lights to hang. On the “strand,” I put the number 1-24 in numerical order, because my sticker sheet has 24 dots.

On each sticker, I put a number sentence (example 8+4) and he had to put that dot sticker onto the number 12 on the Christmas tree.

**I know the Common Core Standard is for addition to 20 but we went up a notch so that I could use each sticker on the sheet.

On the dot sticker sheet, I mixed up the number sentences!

My son had to hunt and find the correct number sentence for each sum on his Christmas tree. I put ONE number sentence per number (sum).

It was so interesting because he went in color order rather than sum order or random.

RELATED: Are you shopping for Christmas books? I have a ton of good suggestions!

Oh and remember this dot sticker tip:

Even with my big kids, I still remove the middle white part of the stickers (or have your child do it!).

Actually, by this point in his life – my big kid does that part on his own before starting a dot sticker activity.

This Christmas tree addition match was perfect for my big kid!

Highly recommend it – it’s just so good and so fun for these kids.