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 and subtraction facts.  By the end of first grade, students should be able to count on to find the difference.  For the difference of 7 - 4, start with 4 and count on 5, 6, 7.  This shows that 7 - 4 = three.  Another strategy is to use related facts to find the difference.  If students use a related fact, 4 + ___ = 7, then they’ll know 7 – 4 = three.   Another strategy would be the near doubles strategy.  Using the same problem 7 - 4, 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.

This video is part of the Learn and Grow with WHRO TV series. Watch Xenia Claire teach about adding and subtracting in story problems using multiple strategies.

This video is part of the Learn and Grow with WHRO TV series. Watch Xenia Claire teach about adding and subtracting in story problems using multiple strategies.

This video is part of the Learn and Grow with WHRO TV series. Watch Shantel Davis teach about related facts.