For example, one time we were in a small movie theater with aisles, and the center section had rows of something like 8 seats, with the side sections had rows of something like 6 seats. So they skip counted the middle section by 8's and the side sections by 6's, then did some mental addition and came up with the total number of seats in the theater. I also remember having them skip counting cars in a parking lot, quarters arranged in stacks of 4, books in a bookcase that could be skip counted easily in groups of 3, cookies on a baking tray in rows of 4, bottles of juice in six-packs, and once even spilled nails on the floor. The cars in the parking lot and the nails on floor did not have any particular grouping amount that suggested itself, so they would just choose some convenient grouping and skip count by that amount. When they were younger, they tended to skip count by 2's and by 3's, so I think I remember occasionally having them skip count by higher amounts.
If you keep your eyes open as you go through your day and your life, you start to see lots of situations and occasions where it's interesting to know how many items are there - like the number of emoticons next to the message body when composing a message on this site - they're arranged in groups of 4, for which it's easy to count by 4's till you get to the last row, which has just 3, for which the skip counting aloud would be, "4, 8, 12, 16, then 17, 18, 19."
BTW, the above example of skip counting is more often than not how counting occurs in real life - you usually don't have a whole-number multiple of the skip count base number to count - that is, if you're counting by 6's, you seldom have exactly 24 or 30 or 36 or 42, etc., of the items in question. So learning to count on by ones from a higher multiple is also good mental math - "6, 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, then 37, 38, 39, 40 - Dad, there's 40" - is more often than not how the skip counting goes.
Hope this helps!
Bob HazenStatistics: Posted by Bob Hazen — Wed Dec 26, 2007 6:01 am
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