Addition Fun!

Today, we continued our work on addition.  We have been practicing addition using a variety of hands-on strategies including counters, building tower blocks with cubes, our fingers, and drawing pictures.  We are now learning about mental math strategies--that is ways we can solve questions in our head.  Today we learned the add one more strategy.  This strategy works for questions such as 4 + 1.  We learned that we don't need counters or our fingers.  We can just count up one from 4 in our head.  We had fun practicing this by playing a game with a deck of regular playing cards.  It is called Add One memory.  It is played just like regular memory, except instead of finding an identical  matching pair like a 4 and a 4, you have to match by finding the card that is one more.  For example if you turned over a 6 first, your matching pair would be a 7.  Try it at home.