I love breaking the addition combinations into categories. I'm sure many of you do also. Yesterday as I was reviewing the doubles and doubles plus one combinations it occurred to me that my students may not realize exactly what a doubles plus one combination means. I know they've heard of it before in earlier grades but I always just want to make sure they conceptualize what they are learning. I made the following with them and it seemed to really help.
First we folded our papers like a hot dog or vertically and placed the fold to our right. We then started to draw out the doubles facts and wrote the combination that matched it next to it.
Then we opened the paper up and we added the one. Students started recognizing patterns and were able to visualize what I meant by plus one. At 6 + 7 I started writing it out as 6 + 6 + 1. I was very clear though that they had to recognize a plus one combo by seeing that the two addends are next to each other on a number line.
I hope this is helpful to your students as it was to mine. Leave me a note and let me know if you use this. I'd love to hear from you.
I also wanted to let you know that I've created a new product on my Teacher's Notebook store! It's called Rounding Mountain!
