Teaching Addition to 20 in First Grade

Hey, y'all! I know you've seen the research that says students learn things more quickly when they play games focusing on the skills. When we teach addition and subtraction skills, we play as many games as we can to practice these skills without drilling and killing.

This is a three-week unit that focuses on adding to twenty, true/false statements, commutative property, and adding 3 numbers togethers. Each week, we start off with a whole group lesson or review. We talk strategies, make anchor charts, and work together to explain our thinking.

Tuesday through Thursday, students visit a series of stations to practice these skills. Sometimes students work in their math group (3-4 students) and sometimes they have more flexibility about what stations they get to work on first. It just depends on your group and what they can handle at that point in the year.

Students work on skills with games and task cards. Most stations have some kind of recording sheet that we place in their math notebooks. Some stations are simply a game and students are in charge of checking each other's work. The whole time, I'm moving between groups checking for understanding and making sure students are on the right track.

On Fridays, we come back together whole group for a game or other activity. These usually serve as my assessment piece. If it's a quick activity, we "grade" our work together and talk about the strategies we used to solve the problems.

The first two weeks of this unit focus on adding 2 numbers with sums within 20. The third week focuses on adding 3 numbers together with sums to 20. The games are very similar but are modified to focus on this skill. I like to keep games out for a couple weeks for fast finishers and bring old activities back sometimes for spiral review of skills.

Our district is pushing for kids to be able to name the strategy they used for solving the problem. Many of mine don't really understand this concept. They say they just count. But when they talk through what they did, they are picking up on strategies like doubles, doubles plus one, and friends of ten. The activity below was designed to help students identify some of these strategies that they use and give them a name.

And we always love a good Bump! game.

You can find out more about this unit and others by checking it out in my Teachers Pay Teachers store here. This is the sixth unit in this series and the bundle will be added to the store soon so stay tuned for that. Thank you for stopping by and have a wonderful week!

Stay sweet,