All Kinds of Addition

Dragon has been doing a lot of good counting in both English and Japanese, and I felt like it was time to introduce addition. It's not really a new concept; he has naturally picked up on it, and regularly asks, "What is 10+9?" But he hasn't been working with the rods very long, so we've been working with just counting exercises, laying the groundwork by attaching meaning to the rods and making sure that his counting is good in both English and Japanese. He's been doing great, so today we started doing addition.

The lady over at Education Unboxed is so good at teaching math, and I was using a different program when Hero learned this stuff, so I popped over to see what she suggests for doing addition. I'm glad I did. Not only did she have a fantastic way of showing the concepts, but there is a lot of it that's vocabulary I know in Japanese, so we went ahead and did the lesson bilingually.



 He doesn't write numbers, so the little bit of that I ascribed for him, but he did great with figuring everything out. I only gave him 6 problems, and just enough rods for what we were doing because the whole bin is overwhelming. I also made up a short 1-5 staircase for reference. 

It doesn't look like much, only six problems, but it was just right. Between the various new concepts and working in both languages, he had a lot of stuff to keep track of. It was just right to get him working, and to stretch his abilities, but not so much as to over do it. I love it when I judge things nicely and it turns out like that!

Hero did some self-checking double-digit addition. I picked this sheet mostly because I knew he would enjoy the hero on the page, and the puzzle. It was actually a little on the easy side for him, since there wasn't any regrouping. When he did it perfectly the first time, it was a great opportunity to praise him for doing careful work. I liked that both because I like to give a well-earned thumbs-up, and also because his last several pages of math had several errors in math facts that he should have known. So the timing for an opportunity to praise careful work was just right. We're really working on addition with carrying, which is frustrating for him (so many places you can put numbers!), so it's nice to have a moment to say, "Hey! You're doing good!" He's been needing that.