A Math Lesson: Adding to Ten

With the holidays over, we have been back into the swing of things with homeschool.  We did a lesson recently on ways to add up to ten.  My goal is for K to memorize all the math facts that add up to ten.  We'll get there eventually.  The introductory lesson for this was something I made up using ten cars and a homemade "math board".  For the math board, I glued two pieces of yellow cardstock to a bigger piece of cardboard.  I wrote a plus sign in between the yellow papers and an equals ten on the right.  Easy!

At the beginning of the lesson, we counted out ten cars.  Then we took turns placing a random number of cars on each piece of yellow cardstock.  We counted them (ex: 7 cars on the left and 3 cars on the right) and wrote down the "new" way to add to ten (7+3=10).  My son was more interested in driving his cars around, so I had to make up little stories as to where they were going in order to finish the lesson. (These five cars are driving to Costco, and these five cars are going to Red Robin for burgers and fries!)  I didn't think that he was really connecting with it, and was sort of disappointed with the end result.  However, about a week later he was watching a LeapFrog video (Math Adventure to the Moon) and there is a segment where Tad & Lilly find all the ways to add up to ten.  He quickly pointed out, "Hey, they are adding up to ten!"  Cool, he really did get something out of the lesson!  

After the introductory lesson,  I made flash cards and we review them now and then usually at meal times.  Of course, he's figured out the answer is always ten so I threw in a couple that don't equal ten just to make sure he's paying attention.  For our next lesson, I'm planning to make a worksheet with the problems written out like this: 4 + _____= 10.  Then I'll know if he really knows the answer and isn't just saying, "ten" to everything.  Most likely, we'll pull out the goldfish crackers to help as counters for the problems he doesn't know the answers to.  In my experience, kids tend to like math a lot more if there is food involved!