Counting by Fives: Hands

I would like to show you how I teach counting by five to the students in my classroom. To begin with, I would have three students come to the front of the room. This is student one, student number two, and student number three. Let’s say, oh, and I would have their fingers extended, so that all the students could see the fingers on their hands. And, I’d say class I would like us to count the fingers that you see, and together we would count. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. And, I go to a boys and girls, that took us a long time to get that counted. How could we count them quicker? I would it take all the answers that they said and listen, and then direct them to, we could count by fives. And we would practice. 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30. we would do that a couple of times, and then, I would demonstrate that a couple of times. And then, we would count together. 5 put the number 5 on their hand, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30. Boys and girls how many fingers do you see? And then they would say 30. That’s a nice job of counting. I would bring up two more students. So, now I have student 4 and I have student number 5. And, we go through the same process again. I would say boys and girls count with me by one. So, we’re going to count their fingers and we do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. We go all the way around until we got to, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50. I’d say, oh my goodness boys and girls that took us a long time to count. How can we do it quicker? Well now they will tell us to count by fives, and I’d say okay boys and girls let’s count together. We’d count 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50. Boys and girls that was much faster way to count by 5’s. Nice job. After we practiced this several times I would have my children sit in a circle, and we are going to play the count and sit game. And, the way we would play it is, we would count by 5 all fingers are extended 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50. Our target is 50. So, this student would sit down and then we would start again. And we’re only going to 50 to begin with. 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50. This student then would sit down. 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50. This student sits down, and then 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50. And this student sits and then we have one student remaining. After we were doing a good job of counting to 50, we would continue that counting by fives to 100. And this is one way that I would teach counting by fives to the students in my classroom.