Skip Counting for Early Learners
Saturday November 8, 2008
My grandson who is in kindergarten came home with homework yesterday which included a variety of hands on activities called 'math in a bag'. My daughter enjoyed playing the numerous math related games with him but said he didn't seem to understanding counting by 2's, 5's or 10's. Although he's pretty young for this, he seemed ready. So she started lining up the smarties in groups of 2 and showed him what skip counting was all about. Skip counting is a great way to teach fast adding and multiplication. However, it is important to start from different numbers. For example, when counting by 2's, don't always start from 2 and try skip counting backwards. Do the activities with your young ones orally for 5 minutes a day and you'll be surprised how quickly they pick it up.
More about counting:
Comments
thats cool…
I liked your description of how the boy’s mom lined up smarties for her son to learn to count by 2s - good math teaching is showing children what math means in the real world. Then kids can see why math works the way it does!
You can see from the same story, that the boy did not previously understand counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s until the smarties came out. We need to remember this at any level of understanding!
counting backwards seems like great way for warming up young one’s brain. I know practicing math regulary is very important thing for young childeren, but it is a little hard for a mom…
As someone who teaches young children, kindergarten is not too early. I’ve taught children how to skip count, multiply, and divide all the way to 12s before the age of 6.
We like to line up all the shoes in each person’s closet and skip count by 2’s to see how many shoes there are. When done, the shoes are all in order and we have learned a little math at the same time.