Happy Monday! Were you as tired as I was today with getting up an hour early?! Yikes. This post is going to be short because my brain is ready to go to sleep again and it’s only 4:30. 🙂
We are working with counting coins right now, and one of my struggling second graders can’t count by 5s yet. We were counting nickels today and she needed support, so here’s what I came up with:
I gave her a hundreds chart and a pile of nickels. Then, I modeled how to place a nickel on 5, then another one on 10, one on 15, 20, etc., until I had covered all the multiples of 5 through 100. While I was placing each nickel, I counted by 5s out loud. I had her do this a few times by herself (she was able to read most of the numbers off the chart).
Once she had some practice with this, then we worked on some problems, like, “If you have 5 nickels, how many cents is that?” She would take 5 nickels and place them, one at a time, on the multiples of five until she figured out how many cents that was (see photo above).
Even if your kiddos can’t yet read all the multiples of five, you can still have them do this to reinforce skip counting and the value of a nickel.
Happy teaching!
