5 Ideas for Your Next Addition and Subtraction Lesson

Whether you’re in the midst of one-to-one assessments, writing reports or you’re just having ✨ one of those weeks ✨ - sometimes you just need a boost of fresh ideas to help you shake up your lessons. This week, we’re here to share 5 Ideas for Teaching Addition and Subtraction in your F-2 classroom. Save this page for your next planning session and let Pevan & Sarah do the heavy lifting for you!

1. Addition and Subtraction Stories

Relating mathematical calculations to real-life stories and problems helps students to form meaningful connections between maths and their everyday lives. It will feel more relevant to them and they’re more likely to remember what they’ve learnt.

A great way to weave these into your lessons is to kick off a Maths lesson with a silly story - the sillier the better! Maybe there are 5 aliens hurtling through space in a rocket ship, when suddenly 3 of them jump out the window to go and play on Jupiter. How many aliens are left in the rocket ship? Get students to draw a funny picture on their mini whiteboards to go with the story - this will help them build strong connections between the story and the process.

Our Addition and Subtraction Stories video series feature Pevan & Sarah involved in all sorts of shenanigans that tell real-life stories linked to addition and subtraction. Sarah needs to fix her wooden train, so she hammers in 5 nails - but it’s still wobbly, so she hammers in 2 more nails. How many nails did she use to fix her train all together? Pevan visits 6 penguin friends in Antarctica, but 2 of them get hungry and leave to find lunch. How many of Pevan’s penguin friends are left? The videos include visual representations that clearly show the process of adding and taking away. Start an addition and subtraction lesson with one of these videos, and then get students to create their own addition and subtraction stories, using drawings or physical objects to solve the problem. If they need ideas or a scaffold, our Picture Addition and Subtraction activity sheets will be sure to prompt them towards a great idea.

If you're a Cub Club subscriber, click the images above to download these resources now! Otherwise, you can grab them on TPT.

2. Using Manipulatives

We know we’re preaching to the choir here, but physical objects or manipulatives are an absolute must in your early years primary classroom when you’re teaching addition and subtraction. From counters, toys and beads to unifix blocks, icypole sticks and MAB, there’s no doubt that kids learn best when they have physical materials to help them bridge the gap between concrete and abstract. If you’re currently teaching your students about mathematical symbols and introducing written algorithms (think 4 + 3 = 7 rather than ‘4 and 3 make 7’), make sure to integrate materials that they can pick up and move around to represent the equation.

A great whole-class warm up activity is to sit students in a circle with access to a pile of counters, blocks or MAB and work together to solve some addition and subtraction number sentences. With appropriate modelling and the opportunity to learn from and teach their peers, students will love this interactive start to your lesson. Then, send them off with our Addition Mats & Cards, featuring a range of differentiated number sentence task cards to choose from and ‘part-part-whole’ boards that can be used again and again with write-and-wipe sleeves. Once students have used their chosen manipulative to solve the equation, encourage them to draw pictures or come up with a story to match the problem. These cards also include missing number equations, which is a fabulous way to teach students about the connection between addition and subtraction.

Purchase our Addition Mats and Cards, Addition Strips 1-10 and Jump in the Pool on TPT if you're not a Cub Club subscriber.

3. Hundreds Charts

If you’re teaching in an early years classroom, we’re prepared to bet you’ve got a hundreds chart displayed somewhere in the room. Hundreds charts are fabulous resources for teaching everything from counting, place value, patterns, and of course, addition and subtraction. The great thing about hundreds charts is that they allow for a great range of differentiation, meaning that no matter whether students are working with single digit equations or they’re able to start applying place value strategies to add and subtract two-digit numbers, they provide a scaffold to support students to really understand the process of addition and subtraction.

Paint the Squares is a fantastic, free online hundreds chart tool with a heap of customisations to support your addition and subtraction lessons. You can choose from a range of boards (1-20, 1-50, 1-120 and more) and ‘paint’ or hide numbers as needed. This is a great way to teach strategies such as counting on and back, building to 10, doubles and near doubles, and adding and subtracting in place value parts, as students can see patterns emerging on the chart in front of their eyes.

A super easy, low-prep game to play afterwards is ‘Race to 100’ (or ‘Race from 100’ if you’re covering subtraction!). Students play in pairs with a hundreds chart, counters and a ten-sided die. They simply roll the die and move their counter forward that many spaces, verbalising the equation as they move (”17 plus 4 is 21!”), aiming to be the first to reach 100. You could ask students to record their equations in their maths books or on a mini-whiteboard, too. Encourage students to use the strategies that you’ve taught in the mini-lesson - if they roll a 9, for example, rather than counting forward nine spaces by ones, move down one place in that column to add 10, then back one space to make it 9. This game can easily be supported or extended by using one 6-sided die or multiple dice for two-digit addition and subtraction. We have Hundreds Charts available in Cub Club if you need copies for your classroom, as well as tens frames and number lines if you're after more tools to support your addition and subtraction lessons.

Grab our Rainbow-themed Hundreds Charts, Tens Frames and Number Lines on TPT if you're not a Cub Club subscriber.

4. Learn Your Facts

Provided that you’ve given students lots of hands-on, differentiated, practical opportunities to work with numbers and develop a conceptual understanding of the processes involved, learning some basic addition and subtraction facts can help pave the way for students to work fluently and flexibly with more complex operations. The challenge is, how do we make it fun, memorable, and not strike terror into the hearts of our little ones? (We’re having flashbacks of those time tables challenges from the 80s and 90s 😬)

Well, not to toot our own horns, but we’ve written some pretty catchy little tunes to help make learning these facts actually enjoyable. Friends of Ten uses the rainbow to teach children about all of the numbers that ‘stick together ‘cos they’re best friends’! Have a little sing and dance to this song, then crack out the tens frames and coloured counters and have students explore all of the different combinations they can find to make ten. They can record it on our Friends of Ten Equations sheet as they do this. Gradually, students will learn these facts by heart, and this immediate recall can help when applying the bridging ten strategy - for example, knowing that 7 + 5 can be broken down to 7 + 3 = 10 and 2 more makes 12.

We also have a Doubles Facts video series which couples funny and memorable rhymes with all the doubles facts up to 10 and 20. Learning these facts can greatly assist with two-digit equations (think 24 + 24) as well as the ‘near doubles’ strategy, which allows students to calculate an equation such as 6 + 7 by thinking ‘6 + 6 is 12 and one more is 13’. Pair this with number lines to demonstrate this strategy.

Our Friends of Ten Equations sheet and Friends of Ten Addition Strips are available to purchase on TPT if you're not a Cub Club subscriber.

5. Make It Fun!

The best kind of learning is when kids are having so much fun they don’t even realise they’re learning! Maths games give students the opportunity to practice the addition and subtraction skills you have explicitly taught them, alongside those all-important social skills of taking turns, playing fairly and being a gracious loser 😉

Paul Swan’s resources page is a literal treasure trove of downloadable games and puzzles. We love his range of spinner games - all you need alongside the game board is a paper clip and a pencil to act as the ‘spinner’ as well as some coloured counters for each player - and they target a huge range of addition and subtraction strategies. We also absolutely adore Michael Minas’ maths games - there are over 40 addition and subtraction games for F-2 on his website alone, and kids are guaranteed to go nuts for them, too.

And if you’re keen to make use of your Cub Club subscription, we have a few games you can download now that pair well with our videos, including our Hopping Doubles game board and our Roll, Double & Cover activity.

Hopping Doubles is also available on TPT.

And there you have it - our 5 Ideas for Teaching Addition and Subtraction in your F-2 classroom. Which ones will you try out this week? Did we miss any? Get in touch via our Contact Page to share your ideas!

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