Math Learning Steps

The easy ones

At this point your child should be very comfortable skip counting by 2’s, starting from anywhere and going up or down. If your child has not started already, it is time to extend this to skip counting by other numbers. The two easiest ones are skip counting by 5’s and 10’s.

By 10’s

Not only is skip counting by 10’s easy to do, it also provides practice with place value. Your child will quickly realize that, if they skip count by 10’s starting at 3, all the numbers will have a 3 in the ones place and the only thing that changes is the tens place. If you have a 100 chart available, use it to show your child that all the numbers go down or up in one column of the chart.

By 5’s

After your child masters skip counting by 10’s, it is time to do the 5’s. When your child skip counts by 5’s, they will be comforted to see that every other number is 10 apart, as if they were skip counting by 10’s.

Experiment with others

There is no hurry to do the other numbers. Skip counting by 9’s can be fun because the ones place gets one smaller and the tens place gets one bigger with each step. Skip counting by 11’s is quite easy.

Have fun with it

This is something you can make into an activity to do with two or more people. Someone says a number to start with, what the skip size will be, and whether to go up or down. Then go around the group with each person saying the next number.