Counting On It

Poor Jeff.  He was born in California during the 50s, which means that he learned to read and to do arithmetic during the 60s.  I don’t know if the reason he never received explicit phonics instruction was because his teachers were a couple decades ahead of the whole language craze or if everyone was just too busy enjoying the ganga and free love to bother with basic instruction.  Whatever it was, he had never heard of silent e until the boys learned about it on PBS.  He also never learned to skip count.

I consider this nearly criminal, as skip counting is critical to having great number sense. It develops fluency in calculation, and it serves as the basis for multiplication and division. Trust me, people, if you never learned, it’s not too late to skip count.  It’s worth it.

If you’re not sure what it is, think about counting by fives.  Or twos or tens.  Now think about counting by sevens or twelves.  Now think about counting backwards from 120, by fours.

It turns out that one of the Massachusetts standards for second grade is: Skip count by twos, fives, and tens up to at least 50, starting at any number. Can you say fun?

We’ve been skip counting forward with twos, fives and tens for quite awhile.  But we’ve always started with zero and we’ve never counted backward.  I hadn’t thought about how important those skills are until I started to read more about skip counting.  So I’m going to have to set my skip counting sights higher.  For now, though, our goal is to count by ones, twos, threes, and on up to twelves.  We’ll skip count until we get to twelve times the number (so for threes, we’ll go until we hit thirty-six).  If you are interested in learning more about how to teach skip counting, I put a bunch of games on the Skip Counting page, which you can find under Curriculum.

We are keeping track of the first goal with the construction paper cones you see in the picture.  Each time you master a number, you get to put an extra scoop on your cone. When you get all twelve, the entire family will go out for ice cream sundaes.

You might notice a third cone in the picture. That’s because the boys and I decided that Jeff’s cadence and speed were not up to par. He failed the threes.  He would like me to point out that despite this humiliation, he did manage to get an engineering degree at Stanford.  I contend that he’ll be prouder of the floor to ceiling cone than he was of that silly Stanford degree.

As with so many things this year, the parents are hoping to learn as much as the kids. Actually, we’re counting on it.