Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Counting by 10s

We've started skip counting recently, and I found that our bin of battered, miscellaneous Hot Wheels made the perfect teaching tool.

The technique was easy as pie: Put stickers on the cars, and give them to the kids to play with. In this case, I labeled the cars by 10s. I gave the kids a jumbled pile and asked them to sort them out in order. Then I'd take a car or two out of the line-up and ask them what was missing. Finally, I'd pull out a car or two and ask them what car would come before or after if they were counting by 10s.

They caught on very quickly, and not surprisingly, were soon playing these simple games on their own. When they're ready, I'm planning to do the same for counting by 5s, this time using the plastic counting bears.

2 comments:

  1. This is such a wonderful idea to use their toys and stickers. Very creative idea on teaching them counting and some math skills. If they picked it up very quickly, then you did a great job teaching the skills needed to do this. I remember some where in my past using my fingers to count by 5's, but don't know where I learned it or who taught me to do so. Hope you have some other toy to do 2's. Good luck with it - E :)

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  2. Love this. The Pixar people should have cottoned on to this and given their cars numbers in 10s and 5s. Think how many *more* cars they could have sold!

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