We are doing quite a bit of skip counting with my youngest at the moment mainly because he is busy learning his times tables.  We are just starting the three times so I wanted to find a fun way for him to practice skip counting in 3’s but I was stumped.  Then a few days ago he asked if we could do some paper snake crafts (he is fascinated by snakes) and as soon as I saw the spiral snakes I immediately thought they would be perfect for skip counting.

We actually downloaded and used 2 different templates.  The first spiral snake  is free to download from  minieco.co.uk and the second spiral snake template is from the Education.com website (I have a free membership with them and then I get to download 10 worksheets a month).

I started off by printing a number of copies onto coloured thin card – we did also try paper but it did not work well.

Our first one was counting in 3’s so we used a hundred square to first highlight the correct numbers and then wrote them onto the snake. (you can download hundred square from a number of different sources – Education.com hundred square, free hundred square from Twinkl)

He loved the end result.

And wanted more, so next we did counting in 5’s and 10’s.

One of the things I really liked about this is the snakes are fairly long so when we did counting in 10’s he went all the way to 400.  I loved this as it reminded him that the number pattern stays the same no matter how big the number gets.

And even his old sister joined in.  They made snake after snake.  Branching out into other multiples like 4’s, 6’s and 7’s.  And yes mistakes were made.  But it ended up being a longer, fun Maths session.  My daughter ended up adding all kinds of numbers and he was singing the number patterns (sorry neighbours).

They were really easy to make – just downloaded and print a template and you are set for a a fun, relaxed Maths session, the kind when no-one really realizes how much they are learning.