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Answer to problem 5:

Have students practice rote counting by 2s, 5s, or 10s as they line up for different activities during the school day.

Counting nickels is an application of skip counting by 5s, and counting dimes is an application of skip counting by 10s.

When students are counting collections of things, encourage them to count by something other than ones.

Recording data with grouped tally marks encourages and provides opportunity to practice counting by 5s and 10s.

TEACHER NOTES:

“In pre-kindergarten through grade two, students should begin to develop an understanding of the concepts of multiplication and division. Through work in situations involving equal subgroups within a collection, students can associate multiplication with the repeated joining (addition) of groups of equal size. Similarly, they can investigate division with real objects and through story problems, usually one involving the distribution of equal shares.”[1]

Second graders will most likely be able to rote count by 2s, 5s and 10s. This rote counting should lead eventually to recognizing that when we count by 2s, 5s or 10s, we are actually counting a quantity, not just repeating a sequence of numbers. This is similar to how young children learn the rote sequence of our number system. Later, they will be able to determine the quantity of a set. By the end of second grade, students should know that the amount in a set does not change, no matter how you count them.

Of course, the ability to skip count comes into play when students are counting money as well as leading into multiples in multiplication.