Episode Summary
In this episode of the Kindergarten Cafe podcast, I go into the foundational aspects of teaching addition to kindergarteners. Emphasizing the progression from concrete objects to abstract representations, I want to stress the importance of utilizing diverse strategies like counting all, counting on, and drawing to foster understanding. We also discuss engaging activities such as dice games and Play-Doh addition to make learning interactive and effective. By encouraging flexibility in problem-solving approaches and demonstrating the relevance of mathematical concepts, I aim to support students in mastering addition skills.
In this episode, I share:
- Foundation in Counting
- Teaching Addition Strategies
- Hands-On Addition Activities
- Practice with Dice Games
- Solving Problems with Drawing
Resources Mentioned:
- Addition and Subtraction Games
- Addition and Subtraction Class Book
- Kindergarten Math for the WHOLE YEAR
- If You Were a Plus Sign by Trisha Speed Shaskan
Connect with Zeba:
- Instagram – @kindergartencafe
- Facebook – @kindergartencafe
- Website – www.kindergartencafe.org
- Tik Tok – @kindergartencafe
Addition and Subtraction
Read the Transcript
[00:01:32]:
Hey teacher friends, it’s Zeba from Kindergarten cafe. And today I want to talk about teaching addition in kindergarten, the best ways to teach our students addition and to practice addition and all of that. So let’s get started.
[00:01:51]:
You’re listening to the Kindergarten cafe podcast where kindergarten teachers come to learn classroom textbooks, tips, and tricks, and teaching ideas they can use in their classroom right away. I’m Zeba, creator and founder of Kindergarten Cafe, and I help kindergarten teachers with everything they need from arrival to dismissal in order to save time, work smarter, not harder, and support students with engaging and purposeful lessons. I’m here to cheer you on through your successes and breakthroughs and offer support and resources so you never have to feel stuck or alone to start saving time and reducing your stress, all while using effective and purposeful lessons that students love. Let’s get started.
[00:02:42]:
So before you even start thinking about teaching addition, you want to make sure that your students have a really strong foundation in counting skills. I would not start introducing addition before that. We want students to have a strong foundation of counting and number order because they’re going to need that. In addition, they’re going to need to know which numbers are more and which numbers are less. Because if you add two things together and you get a number that is less, then you did it wrong. And we want students to have a strong understanding for the order of the numbers and counting because they will use counting in addition to start. So the most foundational addition strategy is counting all the things. So if you have three cubes and you add four cubes and you say, how many cubes, now they’re going to count 123-4567 as opposed to saying, oh, I know, three and four make seven.
[00:03:38]:
So the most foundational strategy for addition involves counting. So that’s why I wouldn’t start teaching addition until I knew my students had that strong foundational skill. So thinking about when they are ready for it, what are some of the strategies that we can use with them for teaching edition we always, when we’re thinking in math and thinking about teaching concepts with our students, we want to always start with the concrete, with objects and then progressing towards more abstract, like drawings or numbers. So we want to have them start doing addition with actual objects. So like I said in my example, if you have three cubes and then you give them four cubes and you say, well, how many cubes do I have now? That’s the kind of thing we want to start out with. And then eventually you’ll move on to having kids draw to represent what they were adding. And from there you can then go to just numbers. In kindergarten, for the most part, we’re not ready for just numbers.
[00:04:39]:
We need that drawing piece or some kind of strategy for the kids counting on their fingers, whatever it might be. For the most part, kids aren’t ready to just do addition facts without any kind of strategy behind it. I love to use number lines or hundred starts when you’re for older kids working on bigger numbers, but I love to use number lines to visualize to help with the progression going to the abstract because kids have, hopefully they have such a strong foundation in counting and number order, they’re able to use that understanding to help them when using the tool of the number line to help them add numbers. So you show them two, and I want to go two more spaces because I am adding two. What number do I land on? I land on a four. So that’s a good tool to have when you’re teaching strategies for addition. And it’s really important for all the things we do that we do lots of strategies for addition and let our students choose the strategy that works best for them. Obviously, some strategies are more efficient than others, and we want to help students get to the more efficient strategies.
[00:05:44]:
But there is kind of a progression that all kids go through and that I’ve definitely seen year after year, which is counting all to start, which is what I mentioned before with the counting of the cubes, where they count every single cube, counting on where they know what they started with. They start with like one group and then they count the rest. Using their fingers to count and then drawing, using a visual of that, or just knowing some basic number facts. That’s sort of the progression that I generally see. So think about if you have a dice game. A dice game is the perfect way to work on addition. And usually kids don’t even know that they’re doing addition. When you do a dice game, if you have two dice, to be specific, then you’re doing addition, and they don’t even really know it because they roll the two dice.
[00:06:32]:
They need to figure out what number is all together. So before you even start talking about, well, this is addition you’re adding. This is what it means. You can be working on that foundational skill of counting all and then helping kids get from counting all to counting on with all the dice games. If you’re looking for monthly dice games, by the way, I’ve got you covered. I have a whole year’s worth in my monthly dice game bundle seasonal fun activities. But they’re really great practice for this foundation of teaching edition. So when kids are rolling two dice and they need to figure out what number they get, usually they start by counting all the dots. That’s counting. All the progression that we want to help them is counting on. So what we want to do is eventually say, hey, what number is this? Five. What number is this? Four. Well, what is it? All together, let’s see if we know this is five. Let’s count on. Let’s count the dots. We know this is five.
[00:07:30]:
So now we’ve got 6789. And you’re going to need to do that modeling for them a few times, and oftentimes they are so used to counting all that, they’re not going to want to use that strategy. But modeling it for them with the dice is a really good way to encourage them to practice counting on. And ideally they would count on from the biggest amount. But if they’re just counting on in general, that’s a great place to start. Once they start doing that, you could start saying, hey, you know, you have a three and a six and you started with the three and now you’re counting all the dots. That’s a lot of counting. What if you counted with the six six, then you’d only have three dots to count.
[00:08:12]:
Let’s try that. Oh, does that seem easier for you? Oh, so maybe try starting with the bigger number. So that’s a way to use dice to help sort of set the foundation for addition. When you are ready to really explain what addition is and what it means and what an equation is. I love using the book if I were a plus sign. If I were a plus sign really gets into what it means to be an equation. How we can write our equations, we can write them left to right, right to left vertically. It goes through all the different examples, and it goes through different word problems that are silly for the kids.
[00:08:52]:
So it’s a really fun book. And then I like to use that to have them make their own story problem where they practice writing an equation. And that’s really how I launch into using equations with additional. So again, I’ve laid all this foundation earlier with talking about things with addition, like, oh, let’s put these two groups together. How many do we have? How can we figure that out? But once I’m ready to start talking about it as an equation and what a plus sign is and an equal sign, I love that book. If I were a plus sign, and then, like I said, we have our own class book that we make where the kids do their own version. They also have if I were a minus sign, when you’re ready for subtraction. But so we go over all the different parts of the equation, and it’s really important to talk to students about the equal sign and how the equal sign just means the same or is right.
[00:09:43]:
And so one part of the equation has to equal, has to be the same as the other part, which is why you could have an equation that says four plus two equals six, and you could have an equation that says six equals four plus two. And that’s really important because it’s important for kids to know that total, the amount could go on either side. And that’s, I feel like something I never learned as a kid and then was challenging for me later on when we went to algebra, switching that mindset, because I had always done it as it’s what you’re adding and then what the answer is on the right. And so to teach kids, that is not the case. It’s this side equals this side. And so when you’re doing examples with equations. You should switch it up too, so that you can have the answer on one side and what you’re adding on the other. And you can also do it vertically.
[00:10:33]:
And that’s important to show as well because the vertical looks a little different. You don’t have an equal sign. You have the line going across and they go through all those examples in the book if you are a plus sign. So that’s why I love that book for teaching about it. And the book gets into how it doesn’t matter which one you add first. And that’s a really important concept for kids to learn, that four plus two equals six is the same thing as two plus four equals six. And the only time that it differs is when it matches a story differently. So an example would be if I have four cookies and then my friend comes and adds two more cookies, gives me two more cookies, now I have six.
[00:11:16]:
Well, in that case, the answer would be the same, doing two plus four equals six, but it more matches the story to do four plus two equals six versus if I have two red balloons and four blue balloons, how many balloons do I have altogether? Again, it doesn’t really matter. I’m sure there’s a better example for what I’m trying to say. It doesn’t matter for the answer, but sometimes it matches the story better for the order of the numbers. But an important, that’s a really important concept for them to practice with. Does it matter which number comes first? And the only way to practice that is to let them try out a bunch of different ways and see that it’s the same answer. So again, I love doing dice games for that because they’re rolling a two and they’re rolling a four, and then they’re adding six, and the next time they roll a four and a two and it still equals six. That’s an important thing for them to practice over and over and over again and to come to their own understanding that the order doesn’t matter. In addition to dice games, as a way to practice addition problems and solving addition problems, I love doing Play DoH edition where they’re using a kind of spinner.
[00:12:24]:
Or you could roll a dice too for how many sort of balls of play doh they’re making, and then they’re going to add some more to that and it’s just more hands on of them building the addition problem. And you could do something similar with cubes where you roll out how many you start with, and then you roll again, how many you’re adding and then how many all together for like a train that you’re combining all the cubes with games that I’ve created and that I like doing with my students to practice are dice edition. So it’s just simply roll two dice and add them together, or edition cover up where they try to get four in a row of the same number, but really they’re just rolling two dice and adding them up. And again, when they’re doing those two dice kind of games, you really want to encourage them to move from counting all to counting on to eventually, oh, I know my math facts. I know from all these games that five plus one is six because I know that one more than five is six. Or I know that five plus two is seven because I know five, one is six and just one more is seven. So when they get to the point where they’re rolling the two dice and they can just write the answer down, ask them, how did you know that so quickly? What strategy did you use? And the first answer will be, I just knew it. And then you’ll say, how do you know it? How’d you know that? Oh, well, I, you know, I know my facts, or I know, like I said, I know that five plus one is six, so one more is seven.
[00:13:47]:
And so that’s a great way to see how they’re figuring that out, how they’re thinking about it. So that’s how I teach addition with my students, and how I teach the equation and how I help them practice and progress through counting, all counting on being flexible with numbers, like knowing one more and one more after that. Or I know that, you know, five plus five makes ten. So then five plus six is one more than ten. And just straight up knowing their math facts, I know five plus six is eleven. Without having to think about it, one thing I did not quite talk about is using drawing to solve problems. When I teach my students about drawing, when we’re solving math problems, it is usually related to word problems, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be absolutely a strategy just for solving the problem, because if they don’t have something to count, one great strategy is drawing to help visualize the problem.
[00:14:42]:
Because if it’s more than ten, they’re going to run out of fingers, so they can’t count on their hands. And that’s sort of their first go to is if they don’t have any objects to count, they’re going to count on their fingers. And having them draw helps progress beyond I need something physical to count to a little bit more of the abstract way to solve the problem. And when I teach students math drawings for the purpose of solving problems, we talk about how it’s important to really draw quickly because the point is not doing a really beautiful math drawing. The point is to solve the math problem. So we tend to stick to circles, squares, triangles, but really any simple shape that they can draw quickly and a lot of helps. And in this case, it does help sometimes to have different, two different kinds of shapes, to see the two different groups and then add them together. So that’s how I use drawing with teaching edition as well.
[00:15:31]:
If you have questions about anything that I talked about or you want more information about any of these strategies, please send me an email a DM I’m happy to answer, happy to do another episode on addition. If people want or move on to subtraction, let me know. I’d love to do what’s best for you. Here’s the quote of the day. I asked a child, how do you know everything? And the boy whose six year old just said, I just have good guesses. So as always, please consider leaving a review sharing with a friend it would mean a lot to spread the podcast other kindergarten teachers like yourselves and I’ll talk to you in the next episode.
[00:16:14]:
Thanks so much for listening to the Kindergarten Cafe podcast. Be sure to check check out the show notes for more information and resources, or just head straight to kindergartencafe.org for all the goodies. If you liked this episode, the best ways to show your support are to subscribe, leave a review, or send it to a friend. I’ll be back next week with even more kindergarten tips. See you then.