Organizing Numbers

Organizing Numbers

Today's task was to organize objects in order to make counting them easier.

They decided that putting the items into groups was a good idea.  Groups

of 2 or 5 or 10 would be good because it's easy to count by 2's, 5's, and 10's.  

'Let's do it in groups of 5...'

'...if we do it in groups of 2 I can count them...'

'...2, 4, 6, 8, 10, ...'

'...We counted by 2's all the way to 40...there are 20 on this side and 20 on that side...'

'...we are going to count by 2's...'

'...we counted by 2's again all the way to 80...but maybe we could have counted 

by 10's or something to make it faster...'

'...we are counting by 5's and we colour coded it too!'

'...we have groups of 5 and 2 leftover...'

After everyone spend some time working on organizing and counting we talked about 

what made it easier and what made it harder.  They discovered...

*When you have a lot of items to count, count by a bigger number like 10's.

*When you have a smaller number of items, you can count by 2's or 5's.

*When you line up your piles you need to have a lot of room so they don't get mixed up.