Video Transcript
A monster has five fingers on each
of its four hands. How many fingers does the monster
have altogether?
The word altogether in this
question means in total. Now, one way we could count the
total of the monster’s fingers is just one by one. One, two, three, four. This is taking quite a while, isn’t
it? There’s got to be a quicker way to
find the answer. Let’s look at the fact we’re given
in the first sentence.
We’re told that a monster has five
fingers on each of its four hands. We’ve already counted four of the
fingers, can you see? And then we add this one here that
looks a bit like a thumb; that makes five. And we can see that the monster has
four hands altogether. One, two, three, four. And because each of the monster’s
hands are the same, we know we can see five fingers plus another group of five
fingers plus another group and one more. We can see four equal groups of
five. So how could we find the total of
four groups of five?
Well, we know how to skip count in
fives, don’t we? It’s quite quick to do. Five, 10, 15, and so on. What if we counted in fives four
times, one for each of the monster’s hands? Each time we make a jump of five,
we’ll show it on a number line. Five, 10, 15, 20. Our monster has five fingers on
each of its four hands. And we found the total number of
fingers that the monster has altogether by skip counting in fives four times. Five, 10, 15, 20. The number of fingers that the
monster has altogether is 20.
