How to Teach Addition

Video Transcript

"So how do you teach addition. It's a simple operation, right? Hi, I'mJimmy and we're her to discuss how to teach addition and sometimes it's pretty straightforward but sometimes it can be a little bit tricky because it's all about the signs, the positives and the negatives. So we're going to go over a few scenarios today to discuss when to do what. Now, let's talk about the first scenario where you have and adding two positive numbers. Now 3 5 is probably something that most everybody could do right away and you can just go straight with 3 5, well, we know that's 8. But, for whatever reason, negatives give people the willies. Suppose you have (-4) (-6). Now when you add two negative numbers together, because both numbers are negative, you're actually adding to the negative aspect. And one approach that you could use if you like is for -4, indicate four negative signs; and with -6, indicate six negative signs. And all you have to do is count up the number of negative signs that you see and as you can tell there's ten of them; so (-4) (-6) will be -10. When you have a positive plus a negative number, then use what you know about signs. You know, positive and a negative really becomes a negative because unlike signs give you negative. So, you can transform that easily to 13-9 which you know is 4. But when you have a negative added to a positive, it's a little trickier because there's going to be subtraction involve as oppose to your addition. So one way you might want to think about it is write eight negatives for -8 and then write 2 positives for 2. And then for every negative, cancel out of positive. So negative, cancel with a positive; negative, cancel out with a positive. Obviously the negatives have more left, so you have one, two, three, four, five and six on the negative front. So I'm Jimmy and I hope I've given you some strategies on how to teach addition."