Fourth Visit- Skip Counting by 2's

On my fourth visit we focused on basic multiplication skills. I decided to focus on skip counting by 2's. I feel like math is a subject where some students really understand the concepts and other students really struggle making the connection with numbers, so I was excited to see how movement could help bridge this gap between learners. We started with an exercise where we explored skip counting by 2's. I wrote- clap, jump, stomp, snap and skip on the white board, we then correlated these movements with, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. When we would say two- that meant we would clap two times, when we said fourth, that meant we would jump four times, and so on and so forth. A few students explained to me that skip counting by two, was a very easy thing to do. My plan was to move on to 3's and 4's that day, but then I noticed a few students who were struggling with the two's, and I wanted this to be an activity where they could feel successful exploring math, so I challenged the students who thought skip counting by two was easy to make their movement more dynamic in some way. To challenge the students more, I wrote an equation on the board that could be solved by skip counting by two's. They were asked to dance for the duration of the answer and freeze in a shape when I had counted to the correct number. Example- 2 x 2 = ? The students would then dance for four counts to show me that they knew the answer. I loved watching the students figure out the math problem with the skills they had previously learned. This activity helped them to stay focused while they danced, so they didn't venture off into some sort of la la land. It was a great activity to visually see what students really understood about both math and movement.