Strategies and Tips for Helping Your Child Add Numbers
Help your child tackle addition with confidence thanks to these addition strategies and tips
If your child needs some support when it comes to adding numbers, then today’s post is most definitely for you.
Why? Because today I’m going to talk through some different addition strategies that children can use when it comes to adding numbers.
These strategies are mostly aimed at children who are starting out with addition, for example adding within 20, although some of these strategies, once learnt, can be applied to larger numbers too.
Why Learn Addition Strategies?
Having a range of addition strategies to call upon when adding numbers is really helpful.
With some tried and tested strategies at their disposal, a child will always have something to try if they’re stuck on a math question. This is empowering, and certainly helps reduce that “Arrgh!-I-don’t-know-how-to-do-this!” panic that some children feel when faced with a math question that feels too tricky.
Not every strategy will be helpful (or even needed) for every sum, but the more strategies a child has up their sleeve, the more chance there is of finding something that works.
My recommendation, if your child is stuck on a particular sum, is to encourage them to think two things:
- “What addition facts do I already know that could help me?” (such as doubles or number bonds – we will cover these shortly), plus
- “What addition strategies do I know that I could use?”
And with that said, let’s get onto looking some of those strategies.
Addition Strategies
A quick note before we start: In order for children to have success with these strategies, children will need to be taught them but also, importantly, they will also need to practise them. That way they will be confident in applying these strategies independently when they need to.
Counting All and Counting On
When children first start out with addition, it’s great to have math manipulatives, such as counters or blocks at the ready. With manipulatives, we can introduce the idea of addition as the joining together of numbers and children can physically move two groups of objects together and count how many there are in total.
When children are using math manipulative for addition, we begin with the strategy of ‘counting all’, before progressing to ‘counting on’.
You can see the difference between counting all and counting on by watching the video below:
Adding Using a Number Line
Another way to add numbers is to use a number line. Let’s take a look:
(For even more information, you can also read this detailed post on number line addition.)
Learn Your Doubles
Knowing the doubles math facts is really useful. By doubles we mean addition facts such as 2 + 2 = 4, or 5 + 5 = 10.
When it comes to doubles, focus first on helping your child become familiar (and ideally be able to quickly and confidently recall) doubles up to 10 + 10.
Not only are they useful math facts in their own right, children can also use these known facts to help them work out other sums too.
Which leads us on to the next strategy…
Doubles Plus/Minus 1 (Or Adding ‘Number Neighbours’)
Once children know their doubles, this means they can also easily solve sums involving ‘neighbour numbers’. By neighbour numbers, I mean numbers which are next to each other on the number line, like 5 and 6, or 8 and 9.
Let’s take 5 + 6 as an example.
If we know that 5 + 5 = 10, we can easily work out that 5 + 6 is going to be one more than 10 – that’s 11. Likewise if we know that 6 + 6 = 12, we can work out that 5 + 6 is going to be one less, still 11.
This is a really helpful strategy. A sum like 7 + 8 might seem a little daunting on first glance. But, if a child knows their doubles, they can use the fact 7 + 7 = 14 to help them.
We can even expand that strategy a little to doubles plus/minus 2 and use a doubles fact such as 5 + 5 = 10 to work out that 5 + 7 must be two more than 10, so 12.
Learn Your Number Bonds to 5 and 10
In the early years, lots of attention is paid to number bonds, particularly number bonds to 5 and to 10.
What are number bonds, you ask? They are pairs of numbers that add together to make another number (hence the idea of a bond – two numbers sticking together).
So, for example, number bonds to 5 are: 4 and 1, as well as 3 and 2. Number bonds to 10 are the following pairs: 9 and 1, 8 and 2, 7 and 3, 6 and 4, and 5 and 5.
As ours is a base ten number system, we are always circling back to the magic number 10. Because of this, it’s crucial that children are familiar with how the number 10 can be broken down into different pairs of numbers.
Focus on helping your child to learn their number bonds to 5 and 10, so they both recognise them and can recall them independently.
If your child is working on number bonds to 10, it can be helpful to look at numbers in ten frames.
Making a Ten
Another strategy that is often helpful when adding numbers that cross into the next multiple of 10, is the strategy of ‘making a ten’. This strategy relies on children knowing pairs of numbers that make 10 (it’s those all important number bonds again!).
Let’s look at an example. Say we want to calculate 9 + 7.
The ‘making a ten’ strategy involves making one of the addends into 10, by taking the necessary amount from the other addend.
Let’s start by showing 9 + 7 as dots in ten frames:
Now let’s make that 9 into a 10 by taking 1 from the 7:
Our 9 + 7 has now become 10 + 6, which is a much easier calculation to do.
Making 10 is a really useful and versatile strategy, and once children are able to use this strategy, they can also use the same principle when adding larger numbers. For example, in sums like 18 + 8 you can ‘make a 20’, or in a sum like 29 + 3 you can ‘make a 30’.
Adding 9 – First add 10 and then subtract 1
The strategy of over-adding is great when adding 9. It basically involves adding 10 (a much easier number to add), and then subtracting 1.
An example: let’s say we want to solve 17 + 9.
First let’s add 10 to 17. That gives us 27. Then, because we only want to add 9, we need to subtract 1. So our answer is 26.
This same strategy works as well if you’re adding 8 to a number. But this time we add 10 and then subtract 2.
The ‘Teen’ Numbers – a Ten and Some Ones
This one isn’t so much a strategy, but it’s worth checking that your child understands this important feature of the teen numbers. That is, that the teen numbers are made up of one 10 and some additional ones.
So 14 is equal to 10 + 4 (one ‘ten’ and four ‘ones’), just as 18 is equal to 10 + 8 (one ‘ten’ and 8 ‘ones’).
Do lots of practice around the teen numbers so that your child becomes confident in adding 10 to any single-digit number.
Other important things to reinforce when it comes to addition
- When adding numbers, the order of the addends does not matter. For example, whether we’re looking at 3 + 4 or 4 + 3, our sum will still be 7.
- What about adding zero? We’re adding nothing, so the 7 + 0 will equal 7, just as 20 + 0 will equal 20… you get the idea. While this may seem obvious, it’s worth always practising a few addition sums involving zero with your child, just to check for understanding.
And that’s certainly enough about addition for today! I hope this post about addition strategies was helpful. For more addition articles and resources, you can browse these posts:
