Wayyyyy back on the 100th day of school, I gave the kids a bunch of colored strips and this challenge: Make an organized 100 chain.
The result? All groups randomly picked colors and counted by 1's until they got to 100. Yes, this did take most of the afternoon. There was one group who used 10 groups to organize their chain.
My reflection was something like this: They don't understand what skip counting is. They can do it, but they don't understand it. They don't truly understand that 5 is always 5. So I started out constantly saying things like, "Five is always five! (holding up 5 fingers) You don't have to count from 1 anymore!" I would do this with 10 too. It takes a lot of exposure before students can really understand such a concept and some still don't. Don't worry though. Counting from 1 is very age appropriate. I would also hand out 10 groups and not call them 10 groups. One day, Avery said, "Hey! It's 10! We don't have to count it anymore." Oh yes! They were onto something.....
The above pictures are just some shots of them working....
Share time! The two friends above counted by 1s to make their 20 chain. This is great! Very age appropriate.
Devan had one of those a-ha moments that I live for. After months of saying, "Ten is always ten," Devan got it! He truly had his own moment. He says, "Hey! Wait! It's just like our fingers! Ten is always ten!" Oh yes, so fun to share with you.
This was a super interesting moment. Look what Logan did! He put two 10 groups together. Here was a sample of our dialogue:
Me: So how did you organize this?
Logan: I put 10 red and 10 yellow. That makes 20.
Me: Can you show me how you'd count it?
VERY INTERESTING PART: Logan points to one link at a time and says, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5....
He's close and onto something! Very neat.....
There was one other student that tried what Logan did...our friend Aryn. So Aryn modeled how she would count hers and I did see Logan go, "Oooooh." We'll see!
Fun stuff. Thanks for reading!
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