Jen's Notebook

Part of being in the second grade is learning to skip count to 1000 by 10’s. Most of my students come into second grade being able to count to 100 by 10’s with ease. SO\o our goal is to practice to 1000. This activity is a part of my calendar time each day and only takes a few minutes to accomplish. Each day the helper counts out 10 straws, and bundles them into 1 group of ten. After they place them into the tens bag, they tell me what number we need to add to our chart that day and how they know their answer. On days when we have a group of ten in the tens bag, the student helper gets to bundle the 10 groups of 10 into a group of 100 and place it into the 100’s bag.

At the end of 100 days, students get to bundle the 10 groups of 100 into a group of 1000. The kids love this activity and as they work on this day after day they notice more and more patterns in the numbers, how to skip count by 100’s and place value ideas dealing with zero. Which is a concept that is almost always a challenge to primary students. It is helpful that the one’s bag stays empty through out this entire activity, showing them that the value of the ones place stays at zero.

This activity could also be done by adding one straw everyday and counting to 100 by 1’s in Kindergarten and first grade.