Counting By Tens

Jan. 6-7, 2014

This was Seth's first introduction to skip counting, so I tried to do a lot of hands-on activities to help him visualize things. 

First I had him fill ten cups with ten gems each. I asked him how many gems he had put in cups and he started counting them one by one:

I stopped him and reminded him that he knew each cup had ten gems, so he just had to count by tens. I had marked all the tens on his hundreds chart so he could see what numbers he needed to count by. He seemed to catch on quickly. 

Next I had him dump out all his glass gems and sort them into piles of tens: 

This one was trickier since he ended up with a pile of seven gems left over. So he had to count by tens, then add seven to his total.

And, to add a little movement, I had him set up a little "skip counting" activity using his foam blocks and notecards with multiples of tens written on them. 

Once he had the multiples of tens in order along the block path, I had him lay a list with all the numbers between the multiples on the ground between the blocks: 

Then I explained that these were the numbers he was "jumping over" when he counted by tens.

Note to self: write the numbers in reverse order next time!

And then he counted by tens and jumped: 

Not sure how much he really got out of this, but he's always a fan of jumping!