" Make a straight line over, then a strait line down, then a nice big curve half way around! It's a real cool number, come on let's try, sing along with me and COUNT BY 5'S! " So goes the count by 5's song on Jack Hartman's
Math All Around Me CD. To enhance this song, and make the numbers more meaningful I made count by 5's gloves.
I acquired 5 sets of orange rubber gloves and 5 sets of blue rubber gloves. I wrote the numbers needed to count by 5's in a pattern on each pair. For example, 5 and 10 are on a set of blue gloves, 15 and 20 on orange and so on. I did this so that if I had a small class, each student could have a pair of gloves but the numbers would still be in order.
To use the gloves, we stand in a circle and I pass out the gloves in order. Some students get 1 glove, some get a pair, depending on class size. As we sing the song, the student displays the number we are counting. (I stand behind the correct number the first few times until the kids get used to holding up their number.) I point out that each glove has 5 fingers, so we are counting 100 fingers by 5's. A whole lot faster than counting 100 fingers by 1's!
Later on I will let the students use the gloves independently to put in order and count by 5's.
This also makes a great small group math game or center.
