License Plate Counting

Believe it or not there are a lot of fun activities that can be done with license plates and street signs. The best thing about these games are that they require very little or even no props or materials. One such game is what we like to call counting plates. All that is required are vehicle license plates in the very low elementary level knowledge of numbers.

The object of the game to count to a predetermined number by finding numbers and counting chronologically until you reach the end goal number. For example, let’s say your goal is to reach 100. One occupant of the car could take odd numbers and the other occupant could take even numbers. If there are more than two people want to play this game at a time, you can either do teams or have people claim numbers as soon as they see fit so they are unavailable for other people until they find the number from a different license plate.

In the game you count with the numbers that you can see nestled in between other letters and numbers in vehicle license plates. In the case of double or triple digits, the number has to be intact. For example, if Aylee was doing odd numbers and her last number that she found was 21, if she saw a license plate that looked like this: AB23L2, then she could claim the number 23. However, if she saw a license plate looked like this: AB2L3H, she could not take the 2 and the 3 to make 23. The digits of the number have to be right next to each other. She could, however, claim 23 with a license plate looked like this: AB2315.

Some fun variations to this game which can change the rules a little better but still provide just as much fun are as follow:

- Multiple Madness: The object of this game is to counting multiples. For example, someone counting multiples of two would be looking for numbers like two, four, six, 10, etc. The person counting in multiples of three would be looking for numbers such as three, six, nine, 12, etc. You can easily do multiples of four, five, and even six for the older kids that pride themselves in knowing their numbers. This variation and allows more than two players to easily play this game, but obviously the more players you have the less fair it is for the person with a higher multiple.

- Count Backward: everyone, or half the people in the car, could choose instead of counting from zero to a predetermined numbers such as 100, could count from 100 down to zero. Therefore, if you have four people in the car that want to play the game, two people could count up from 0 to 100 doing odd and even numbers while the other two people could count down from 100 doing odd and even numbers.