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Counting to 100 Teaching Idea

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Counting to 100 is a huge milestone for kids. Each time one of my kids learns this and finally gets it, they are so excited!  This post has ideas for helping kids learn to count to 100.

Counting to 100 Teaching Ideas

My little 4-year-old daughter has really caught on to counting past twenty this month.  She finally gets the pattern.  She has been begging to do math lately, so I thought I would work on counting to 100 with her.

We have a poster size hundred chart. (Grab my free printable hundred charts in THIS post.)  I pulled it out and we counted together all the way to 100.  When we reached it she was so excited that she ran to tell her big brother.  She was just beaming.  Then she came running back and said “more math!!”  It have to tell you that it is these moments that a homeschooling mom (or any teacher) lives for!

I remembered the book that I have, One Hundred Hungry Ants, by Elinor J. Pinczes.  We read that together and used our little counting animals in place of ants.  My older son thought this was so much fun and joined right in.

We started by counting out one hundred animals by placing them right on the numbers of the hundred chart.

In the book, the ants are on their way to a picnic.  They are in a single file line at the beginning.

Here are our 100 animals in a single line:
100 hungry ants

Then the littlest ant decides that it would be quicker on 2 rows of 50- we split our row in half to line them up in 2 rows.

counting to a hundred

The book goes on- each time the ants line up in different ways that add up to 100.  This concept was great for my 1st grader as he worked out the addition and multiplication problems that the book presented.

counting animals
The last combination was 10 rows of 10.
counting with kids
Did the ants make it to the picnic in time?  You’ll have to read it to find out! 🙂

More Ideas for Counting to 100:

See my post with Hundred Chart Learning Ideas.
Grab my printable Fill in the Blank 100 Charts.
Also see how we made a Hundred Chart Puzzle! (Includes printable Hundred Charts!)

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12 Comments

  1. Hey,I have that book! I never thought about using it with the younger set of learners but this is a great idea. We could even just use colored buttons or blocks for the “ants”. Thanks for sharing.

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