How to Teach Kids Subtraction with Circles

Video Transcript

"We just showed you how to make a dots worksheet for addition and you can also use household objects just like with counting to teach addition, you can take products our of the refrigerator, their toys, have them add if I had this many eggs and this many eggs, how many all together? If I had 3 teddy bears and I add 1 more teddy bear and you can do that all throughout your household. But once they've learned addition for about a couple weeks, you could start to introduce subtraction if you think they have the concept clearly down of addition. And again for subtraction, you can start with a very basic dots worksheet. Now instead of dots, we're going to draw circles because you'll see it's a little better to make them a little bigger. But it's the same basic idea. Now first teach them that the minus sign means we're taking something away. Teach them the first number is how many we have. This means we're taking away the next number from how many we have. So we have 4 and we're taking away 3. That's why children learn the word take away rather than subtract for a long time, they'll use that word instead because it makes concrete sense to them. Of course this means what we will have, what we will get. This is what you get when you do this. For 4, I have them draw 4 circles. Now instead of drawing circles over the 3, because it's take away, we're going to show how many of these circles we get rid of. So we're going to x out 1, 2, 3 and have them count out in the beginning. How many are left? We get 1 when we do this. Again, draw 6 and then don't draw anything for 1, instead, how many do we take away? One. Count how many are left with your pencil tip 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and continue that way. Remember you can make as many of these as you can. You can make them quickly. You can photo copy them or you can just keep making fresh ones to give them the ideas so they can keep getting new problems."