Have your class sit in a circle on the rug, and place a large number line in the middle of the circle with the numbers five, ten, fifteen, twenty and twenty-five circled in red. Then open the bottom of a plastic piggy bank and pour out the pennies onto the rug in front of you. Tell your students you need their help to find out how many pennies there are on the rug. Explain that they will need to help you by counting five pennies at a time and placing them in plastic bags. Call a student up to help and let her count five pennies and place them into a small plastic zip bag. Then zip the plastic bag closed and place it above the circled number five on the number line.
Continue to call up students to help you count five pennies and place them into small plastic bags until all the pennies have been counted and placed above the appropriate circled numbers on the number line. Remind your students that there are five pennies in each bag on the number line and that you will use the numbers on the number line to count the pennies by five. Use your pointer to point to the circled number under each plastic bag and count the pennies by fives until you have counted all twenty-five pennies. Call students up to use the pointer and the number line to help the class count the pennies by five.
Next, show the students a nickel and tell them that one nickel equals five pennies.On the number line on the rug, replace each bag of five pennies with one nickel. Then use your pointer to point to the number under each nickel and count the nickels by fives until you have counted to the number twenty-five. Call one student up at a time to use the pointer and help the class count the nickels by fives.
Pick up the nickels and put them next to the closed piggy bank. Then tell the students that the class will count the nickels by fives as they are placed into the piggy bank. Have one student at a time place the nickels into the piggy bank as the class counts by fives up to the number twenty-five. Then empty the bank and continue the process, calling other students to place the nickels into the bank as the class counts by fives.