Thursday, February 20, 2020

Counting Connections

I love choral counting! This is confirmed every time I participate in one in a classroom.  It doesn't matter if it is a Kindergarten or 5th grade.  Choral counting gets everyone thinking--including the teacher!

One piece to choral counting that I have found to be important is the connections that can be made between different choral counts.

For example, this was an eye-opening choral count for some 2nd graders.  We began with the confidence builder of counting by 5s.  We broke it down by looking for patterns.  A lot of good talk and discussion here, but it really kicked up a notch when I challenged them to count by 5s off-decade.  We began slowly, but then the students were able to idenify patterns and get going.  We looked for patterns in this count, too, and then I pulled the two counts up side by side.  The ahas! that the students had were quite exciting!  So important for students to make these connections.

I did another one recently in a 5th grade classroom where we counted by 21s.


Students stepped up to the challenge of counting by 21s and looking for patterns.  But the real excitement came when I asked them to do another count by 2.1.  (I had copied the first count onto a clean page before we had found its patterns.) Students kind of gasped, but then I pulled up the clean screen of our previous count.  They counted by 2.1 as I added decimal points into the numbers.  When we were done, we made connections between the two counts and place value.  We also discussed what would have happened if I had asked them to count by 210.  These place value concepts were things that they "knew," but when we put it on paper, it really clicked for them!

Because I am in and out of classrooms, I did these "double-counts" in one session making the choral count a little longer than usual.  I certainly think that it would work for a teacher to do one one day and the second one the next day.  The importance is the time taken to connect the two counts, and following-up in later days with similar counts in order to help cement the counts into students' minds.

Beginning with choral counting is your first step.  Give one a try!  Once you get past that hurdle, you will feel more comfortable moving into a double-count!