How to Tell Kids Addition Stories

Video Transcript

"Another way to emphasize what addition really means is to reverse it. You tell your child a story that has an addition problem in it and then they have to figure out what the problem is and then solve it. So I could say, you had 3 friends over today, those 3 friends plus yourself make how many children all together? Now write that down in a problem and I would start out, when you make a worksheet like this give them a box plus another box equals the answer. And you can make the answer a box, I make a line just to show it's a different type of number. For that last story you plus 3 friends, it would be 3 + 1 = 4. You can, of course the stories are unlimited. You can say you have 4 lollipops and your friend gave you 3 more, so how many did you have all together? Before you answer that, write the problem in here. So how many, remember this is the first number you started out with. You had 4 lollipops and they can draw the lollipops if they need to but this time they might not need to, plus 3 equals how many? Now, if they have to draw dots or even in this case you could draw lollipops, that's fine. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. They count with their pencil point and then they write the answer and you say good job. Then tell them another number story. I had 8 teddy bears and somebody gave me 2 more, how many teddy bears did I have at the end of the day? And they write it in. Drawing teddy bears would be tedious, tell them to make a circle for each teddy bear or a dot. And there you have another very simple worksheet that you can do again and again to emphasize and build their skill of learning addition."