As a teacher your goal is to provide practice using carefully selected strategies. Through encouragement you can provide experiences for students to develop efficient strategies. Use the following strategies to develop the basic addition facts. By the end of first grade, students should be able to counting on to find the sum.  For the sum of 4 + 3, start with 4 and count on 5, 6, 7.  This shows that 4 + 3 = 7.  Another strategy is to use the near doubles strategy to find the sum.  Using the same problem 3 + 4, add 3 + 3 to get 6 and then add 1 more to get seven.  Or using the same problem 4 + 3, add 4 + 4 to get 8 and then subtract 1 to get seven.By providing experiences to learn these strategies, students will develop number sense and understand how to compose and decompose numbers.  This in turn will help students to develop basic fact fluency and learn while having fun playing a game.