8 Skip Counting Beach Puzzles

Gaining confidence with skip counting is a great way for kids to improve their mathematical thinking. Learning facts so they’re instinctive means their brains are freed up to think about the more difficult aspects of a problem. These free skip counting beach puzzles are a fun way to encourage this automaticity.

Creating your puzzles

Download the Skip Counting Beach Puzzles (below), print them onto card then cut along the dividing lines. Laminate them before cutting if you want the extra protection. They’re easy to store separately by holding the pieces of each puzzle together with a large paperclip.

Using your puzzles

Depending on your child’s age and ability give them a puzzle and see what they do with it. They can either focus on putting the picture together, or focus on the numbers. Either way is fine as long as they’re sure to read through the numbers when they’re done as a double check.

Ask your child to point to each number as they read them to make sure they’re practicing reading the number. Some children might know how to skip count because they’ve learned it by rote, but not actually recognise the written numbers, particularly once they’re over 20.

It can also be helpful for kids to look at a hundreds chart and highlight the numbers they’re practicing with their skip counting to make sure they understand where these numbers fit into the whole pattern of 100.

Essential addition strategies

If you’d like to know more about what skills are particularly important to future success in math you can read (or listen to) this interview with Dr Elida Laski.

More free puzzles?

• 8 Skip Counting Beach Puzzles
• 6 Vegetable Skip Counting Puzzles
• 8 Christmas Skip Counting Puzzles
• 8 Valentine Skip Counting Puzzles
• 8 St Patrick’s Day Skip Counting Puzzles

Download these skip counting puzzles

Click the highlighted link to download your Skip Counting Beach Puzzles. The file will immediately be sent to your downloads folder or other device equivalent.

Wants lots of counting puzzles?

I have a pack of 122 puzzles – 61 colour and 61 black and white that cover counting on 1-100, skip counting by 1s, 2s, 5s and 10s, and number words. Pop over to Teachers Pay Teachers to take a look!