Teaching with Ticia: Skip Counting tips and tricks

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I don't know if your kids are like mine, but mine have been struggling with skip counting. So, I've been working on a plan for that.

I'm still trying to find a fun game to get them going for 2's, but we've got it down for 5's and 10's.



I traced out lots and lots of their hands. If you want to see very cute pictures of the making process go to my original post here, but I figure you all know how to do that. After cutting them out, I passed out all of them to each kid and myself, and then we took turns putting the hands back in place in order.

As we were playing this game I thought of all sorts of ideas of how to expand on this.

Here's what I thought of.


1. You could plan ahead and actually make this into a patterning exercise. My numbers randomly ended up on different colors, but imagine if you had two different colors and put the 10s on the same color every time. That could automatically lead into talking about counting by 10s.

2. If you trace both hands together it could make a wonderful butterfly and be counting by 10s. Again it could also be made into a patterning activity by doing different colors.

3. Number identification. You could build it with base 10 blocks, or whatever you're using.

4. Ours is currently making a very lovely garland, and you would not believe how incredibly proud kids are to see their work hung up for everyone to see. They point it out to anyone who comes within 50 feet of our house.

5. This also leads into greater than and less than. My kids are working on this concept, and it was fun for them to start making the connections between the different numbers.

6. If it's slightly sturdier than the fun foam I made mine out of you could walk on it. My boys started walking on it as they were counting and laughing like it was the best game in the world. I was less than pleased because the numbers were not looking too healthy afterwards, but it helped them get it down better.

Anyone have any other extensions for this? One of my readers said she uses clovers for counting by 3's, and I've been thinking about other things I could use.

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