Skip Counting Finale

Feb. 3, 2014

For our last day of our skip-counting unit, I had Seth practice all the skip counting he had learned. We started off counting beads by 10s:

Then we counted marbles by fives:

And gems by twos: 

Then we recorded our findings: 

Next time I'll be smarter and cut down the numbers significantly. I let Seth decide how many beads/marbles to pull out, but it takes a LONG time for a little guy to count 231 beads, even by tens!

Counting by Twos

Jan. 27, 2014

We finished off our skip-counting unit by learning to count by twos. We spent a lot of time just chanting the numbers to learn the 'rhythm' of counting by twos. Once we got that down, we practiced counting all kinds of things by twos, like cars:

He didn't like counting by twos since it took so much longer than 5s or 10s, but it does tend to come quite in handy!

Counting By Fives

January 13-21, 2014

Counting by fives was a pretty easy step after learning to count by tens. First I gave Seth a bunch of popsicle sticks with each of the 5s between 5 and 100. He had to put them in order, then we said the numbers aloud:

Later, we dumped out all the glass gems and counted them in groups of five: 

I also started teaching him about tallying, since it's just counting by fives!

We used popsicle sticks as tally marks, making sure the fifth one sat diagonally on top of the four: 

He seem to catch on pretty quickly to the idea.

Now we just need to come up with more games using tally marks!

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!