Door-2-Math Blog

Learning is a marathon, not a sprint. Resist the urge to push. As they say, there is no “free lunch” – protect a young child’s curiosity for they see not what you value as the importance of math – their college and career choices. They see fun and that is all they see. Can’t make learning math fun? Then don’t do it at the expense of lost curiosity. One can always find another teacher to teach math, but only you can protect your child’s curiosity. Guard it as if your child’s happiness depends on it – for it does.

Skip counting by numbers other than units of 10 is wasteful because all it’s really about is addition. For instance, skip counting by 2′s is adding 2 to the previous number, and forced upon a child, we often find that it slows down the learning of multiplication significantly. For example, a child who is used to skip counting by 2′s will quickly recognize 2,4,6,8,10,12 etc. So she will be comfortable with “2×1=2, 2×2=4,2×3=6, 2×4=8″ and so on. But since she is so used to counting by twos, it doesn’t occur to her that the indeces of those numbers (2,4,6,8) are what’s important. So when asked “10 is 2 times what?”, the same child, who can skip count brilliantly, often gets stuck and sticks out all ten fingers and bends one at a time to see how many fingers are down before “10″ is read. Sounds silly? Not to the child when everyone else who didn’t get pre-exposed to skip counting quickly figures out that 5+5 = 10 so “10 is 2 times 5″.

As much as it may embellish your child’s “math genius” label, try to resist skip counting. And if you must, teach skip counting by 10′s and by 100′s only.

• Start by gathering a jar full of pennies (about 500 pennies is a good start).
• Have him count through all the pennies. Listen carefully for the quality of transition from “9″ to “10″, “19″ to “20″, “29″ to “30″ etc. Is the transition smooth or laborious? Any mistakes?
• After the pennies are counted, grab the same pile and group the pennies 10 at a time and count them 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90.
• See if he asks “how come you count that way?” If not, ask your child if she hears the difference between how you counted and how he counted.
• If your child is not catching on, gently nudge one more time. Still no interest? Don’t force it. Skip counting is not worth trading his/her learning curiosity.

Before a child understands and absorbs the concept of placement value (i.e. using zeros to hold a “spot”), it is a bad idea to teach skip counting because it forces a child to memorize. Memorizing math from an early stage harms the the skill of  “figuring it out”. The longer a child memories math facts, the greater chance of struggle in the high school years. When you get a chance, flip open any trigonometry textbook and ask yourself – “Do I want to memorize all these formulas?”, “Do I want my child to memorize all these formulas?”. Some parents may be thinking “Our Johnny is very artistic and math is not important”. That’s all fine until you see how many art-related job opportunities Johnny will have to give up because he didn’t learn to speak “math”.

Skip counting itself is good practice. The issue is timing – when to introduce it to your child. If you ever baked a cake, you know what I’m talking about. Take the cake out too early, it’s too moist. Take it out too late, and it’s burnt.

The best time to introduce skip counting is when your child has progressed counting by ones. Here are some tell-tale signs:

• Able to count any combination of dimes, pennies, and dollar bills.
• Able to translate “two dollars and seventy” into two one dollar bills + seven dimes + five pennies.
• Able to read and write numbers under 999.
• Getting bored when you ask him to count from “1″ again.