Math Learning Steps

Variety

Skip counting is one way to add interest to counting a group of objects, and there are often many other ways as well. Show your child that they can use their imagination to explore the many other interesting ways they can count a picture of some objects.

Ten frames

Ten frames offer a simple example of different ways to count. Suppose you have seven dots in the usual way in a ten frame. You can count this as 5 plus 2 more. You can count by 2’s from left to right to get to 4, and then add the 3 single dots. Or, you can see the 3 blank squares and count this as 3 less than 10.

Be playful

Play with all the different ways you and your child can do the counting. Seeing different ways to get the answer will open your child’s eyes that math is about exploring and play, and not about arriving at an answer in some preferred way. All these different ways of counting will also develop a deeper understanding of quantities for your child.

Additive approaches

One way to count up a group of objects is to add up the different parts of the group. That’s what we did in this ten frame example when we added up 5 from the top row to the 2 in the bottom row.

Skip counting

You may see a repeated pattern when you add up the parts of a group. That’s what happened when we started by skip counting the two 2’s on the left side.

Subtracting

Another common technique is to subtract off what is missing from what would otherwise be a whole collection. That’s what we did when we subtracted 3 from 10 in this example.