I love when math becomes a natural part of our lives. When my five year old mastered counting to 20, we began counting by two for fun. Now we count by two all the time, it is faster and she gets to see and hear herself say even numbers. We always make sure to pair up whatever we are counting. For example, this morning as we were coloring she paired up some of her colors.
When I asked her how many she had, she answered “Six!” without even thinking about it. She is now at the point where seeing three pairs means six without having to count it up. That intentional practice sprinkled throughout the day leads to great number sense in the long run. We never sit there and recite it, we do it authentically when we have a lot of things to count up.
Maybe next we’ll start to tackle groups of three. Skip counting is so fun!
Beyond Traditional Math 
I like that you pair up the concrete items to the abstract words/symbols of the numbers. My 6 YO son (who happens to be sitting by me as I read this post) has been skip counting by twos. So I asked him how many markers were in the picture. He said “5”, so I asked him how he knew and he looked at the picture again and said “Oh, 6.” So again I asked “How do you know?” His response was 2 and 2 make 4 and 2 more is 6…which is starting to get there but not quite. Thanks for posting!
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