My family and I love taking summer trips to popular spots, but with crowds comes increased potential for getting lost. These four tricks for learning phone numbers are a fun way to make sure kids are ready just in case they need it.

Hopefully they never will, but it’s best to be safe.  And speaking of tricks up our sleeve, hop over to become a VIP Plato Pack member so you can get all of the tools, strategies and support you need to reach ALL of your learners.


Phone Number Hopscotch

For our first learning phone numbers activity, I created a modified hopscotch layout with all ten digits — 0 through 9. I had my son, C, jump from digit to digit as I said my phone number.

4 Tricks for Learning Phone Numbers. {Playdough to Plato}

I didn’t lay out the digits in numerical order — if I had, C would have had some pretty huge jumps — so I made sure to put consecutive numbers closer to each other.

We did this several times until he started chanting and jumping to the numbers on his own.  He was pretty excited when he was able to do my entire phone number without help!

Phone Number Song

Hopscotch helped C get familiar with my phone number, but when I asked him to tell it to me the next morning, he could only remember the first three digits.  C loves to sing, so I put my phone number to the tune of one of his favorite songs — the theme for Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.  In place of “M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E,” we sang my phone number.  There’s one extra syllable so at the end we said “Mom” — that way he knew that it was my number rather than his dad’s. Our words were, “2-0-0-8-6-3-1-2-3-4-Mom.” (P.S. Any phone numbers used in this post are fake.)

My son loved it and sang it all the way to school.  When I asked him to tell me my number after school, he was able to sing it to me perfectly! This was the activity that really got the phone number to stick in his head.

Other good songs to use for learning phone numbers are “Camptown Races”, “Jingle Bells”, “She’ll Be Comin’ Round The Mountain”,  and “Oh My Darling Clementine”.  If you think of any other good ones, please share in the comments below.

Dialing Phone Numbers

Once C was able to remember my number, I really wanted him to have some practice actually dialing it. I let him play with one of our old phones and had him “call” me several times. I also wanted him to have a more active activity, so we drew a big keypad on our driveway and C practiced “dialing” by jumping onto the digits.  It was lots of fun and really reinforced his memorization of the number.

Fun tricks for learning phone numbers. {Playdough to Plato}

Phone Number Count

Then we got a little counting practice in while also working on learning our phone number — I had C count out Cheerios for each digit.  He did this several times while saying the numbers out loud.

4 Fun Tricks for Learning Phone Numbers. {Playdough to Plato}

It’s been a few weeks since we started doing these activities and C now has my number down pat.  It’s a very comforting feeling knowing that he can get in touch with me if we should ever get separated.  If you have any awesome techniques that have helped your kids learn their phone numbers, please share in the comments below. We always love hearing from you!

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13 Comments

  1. My son is starting kindergarten soon, and we feel it’s important for him to know his number before he begins. So these ideas are PERFECT for us right now. I’m totally going to make a song with our phone number today! And my son will love jumping on a large, chalk-drawn number pad too! Thanks for the great ideas!

  2. This is fantastic thanks! It just occurred to me that typing this into a kid friendly calculator would also be a lot of fun, and the digital display will reflect it back for some more visual reinforcement.

  3. These activities were so well received by my little one. I modified it to have my older daughter practice her times tables and we had a great time singing our phone number to “She’ll be coming around the mountain…” Thanks for all of your wonderful ideas!

  4. Love your Mickey Mouse song idea for learning phone numbers! I can’t wait to share it with our families! Thank you so much!

    1. You are very welcome, Lori!
      Hope your families love it too!
      Warmly,
      Ashley // Happiness Ambassador

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