Skip Counting to 10 Flower Craftivity

Children LOVE skip counting. When they are so used to counting one number at a time skip counting feels a bit like cheating and mastering it fills them with pride. Of course, it’s one thing to be able to parrot the numbers by rote and another to understand the concept behind it. This Flower Power craftivity was designed to give children multiple ways of ‘seeing’ the concept.

• counting the numbers of leaves and seeing them rise higher up the stem
• counting the cupcake liners: 2 for each flower
• counting the play dough ‘stamens’ (the dots in the middle) and realising they need to get smaller as the number increases
• making each stem longer as the number increases
• placing the flowers higher as the number increases
• writing the number at the bottom of each stem

What You Will Need

• 2 pieces of black card or paper for the background (or you might like blue or white)
• Green card or paper for stems and leaves
• 2 sizes of cupcake liners (we used what was in our cupboard but it would be nice to have different colours). If your liners have more colour on the outside simply turn them inside out.
• Play dough
• glue

How it’s Done

1. Tape 2 pieces of black card together to make a long rectangle
2. Cut the green card into 10 approximately 1 inch (2.5cm) strips.
3. Lay 5 of the green strips onto the black card evenly spaced.
4. Cut them into different lengths from the shortest (2) to the longest (10)
5. Glue the stems down.
6. Fold the other green strips in half length-wise and cut half ovals for the leaves. The longer the oval, the longer the leaves. If this gets too time consuming or fiddly for any of your children just have them colour the leaves on each stem with a green oil pastel.
7. Glue the leaves down, keeping in mind they must leave room at the top for the flower.
8. Glue a large cupcake liner on the top of each stem.
9. Glue a small cupcake liner inside each large one.
10. Make small balls from play dough and glue them inside the small cupcake liners.
11. Write the numbers on the bottom of each stem.

Students can then discuss with each other (and any visitors) how thoroughly they understand the concept of skip counting by 2s.

What other ways have you found to effectively teach / reinforce this concept? I’d love to hear your ideas!