Teaching Addition With
Base Ten Blocks

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Teaching addition with base ten blocks will make your job easier and make the math more understandable to students because they can see what they are doing. Your students need to know all 45 of their addends and they need to master them. Most methods try to accomplish this with worksheets and drill, but i say be careful with worksheets. There is a better, funner way.  

Perhaps you are unaware of how poorly the worksheet  method works...the littles learn to hate math and worksheets at an early age.

There are only 45 addends so it's not SO bad, but then the same method is applied to multiplication where there are 144 facts or at minimum 81 and students begin to rebel. Meantime most students i run across who need tutoring have yet to master their addends and many primary teachers have never even heard the word.

The best way to teach anything is through playing. At the house of math we go all the way out to 20x20 and have FUN doing it when it comes to multiplication. Sing songs, build big rectangles, pile up little ones, learning math all the way. 400 multiplication facts are much easier when they master 45 addends. 17x7 is just 70 + 49, 4 and 7 is always 11...119. 

The addition main page will give you a taste of what you get with the addition course where i show you how to put the child in a situation where they can not fail so you can not fail to teach them mathematics. 

Use your sitewide password. This is a course that teaches you how to play addition. Play math. Have fun.  Scrolling and binge watching video's is a thing, but when you are done scrolling and binge watching you'll be better at teaching addition than most teachers who paid many hundreds for their credits and still can't teach addition worth a _______. 

i know, i have made a living tutoring boys and girls that are in their teens and still can't add two numbers together with ease much less subtract them. Get this course. the younger the child the better. 

The Addition Course

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The littles will build towers and houses and pyramids and cubes and all manner of structures with blocks over and over again...and it's fun.

Filling out a worksheet is negative fun most of the time. You just have to make sure they are using addends to make the pillars and walls not just the same block over and over again.

Concept based teaching. 

The concept is simple to start: numbers are made up of other numbers. Making tens and nines is easy...put the student in a situation where they can't fail, use a tray for example, to make 10's. While you are at it you can throw a little algebra in there...once they have built tens a few times they see there are only 5 combinations.  (Six if you count 10 + 0.) And if you've played what's under the cup enough times 7 + x = 10 is easy...because they have seen it. And terms like additive inverse may sound confusing but are easy to understand...get rid of the 7 from both sides and you can easily see the 3.

For Parents And Teachers:

Here is a video that explains some concepts in detail. You can see that we can't really do addition without some subtraction and vise-versa.  Watch this video it's HUGELY important to understand.

Simple secrets revealed.

Watch this video carefully. It is deceptively simple. Quite a few primary education teachers have a hard time with adding the addend. It just goes against the grain...but using base ten blocks and addends for teaching addition make it easy to understand and i assure you after 30 and more years of doing this: THEY GET IT. 

The addition course guarantees your success. Learn how to teach addition the right way. The easy way. The fun way. Once you see how easy addition and subtraction can be learn how to use this method to teach math in your homeschool or classroom.

Get hours of M0ar training. These skills can easily be taught and are easily duplicatable. 

Teachers of mathematics may enjoy the simplicity of the presentation (i hope) and whether you are a teacher or not i expect you can see how many concepts go together. You may also end up compound teaching by accident. This is why people who use this method say (without boasting) that we can teach more in an hour than "traditional" methods do all week, that's not to say many traditional techniques are backward, archaic ineffectual and stupid but...

Build addends over and over again. Make an addends pyramid. Instead of using the same block over and over again, make addends. Listen to multiplication rock while you do and about square numbers.

Add:

20 + 20 + 20 + 20, which is the same as 20 x 4 but not 20⁴.

Have a discussion about exponents. 

Cout them up from 1x1 to 20x20. 

100 + 90 + 90 + 81 = 100 + 180 + 81 = 280 + 81

100 + 80 + 80 + 64 = 100 + 160 + 64 = 260 + 64

100 + 70 + 70 + 49 = 100 + 140 + 49 = 240 + 49

...

We talked about square roots...and did all the square roots which is just counting one side of the square. "That's easy".

Talk about and write out

20² = 400

19² = 361

18² = 364

All the way down to one. 

...

Lots and lots of math. No worksheets. 

Hack with blocks & playdough

Here is a fun little tip for people who have wobbly desks or kids who may have some challenges with fine motor skills due to autism or vaccine damage or what have you. Make your towers sturdier. These two got it done without any playdough.  

Or you can just use more posts...

Sometimes it's the little things that make the difference. You may not be able to incorporate this tip in the classroom but at home it's easy to do. Building towers are just one of the many activities i show you to do. i show to play with purpose. They learn math while they play. 

Lessons on square roots teach addition and multiplication, besides it's just plain FUN to build stuff. Multiplication is just adding the same number over and over again.

Absolutely Amazing Addends will make learning addition fun. i also have workbooks that will help your child learn to add numbers together with ease. What they need is a simple algorithm. Stories about the numbers "having a party" or "wanna be a ten" make math concepts like addition easy to understand. The principle is simple. The methods are many.

Reinforce addends with workbooks. My  workbooks aren't your father's math workbooks. They are Wildly Wondrous Workbooks. Your students will love them. Making addition fun and easy makes subtraction fun and easy and that makes multiplication easy and when multiplication and subtraction are easy division is easy. 

i spend so much time on addition because it lowers cognitive load...they don't have to think about it if they know their addends.  i even give you an example were an older student is doing fractions but i can see she needs help with addends...

Learning the 45 addends by heart is what these pages are here for, use what you see and emulate it in your particular situation...your lessons will be like these, but make up your own stories...build your own stuff, go at your pace, or better yet your child's pace. If you start early enough you have plenty of time for everything...just play. Play is highly under rated as a teaching technique which is ridiculous when you think about because when they are little thats all they want to do: so play.

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Go Back Home.

Addition Course

How about making this process easy and fun? i have written quite a few blog posts about this over the years. Here are two posts showing actual footage in classrooms with first and second graders. You will note we do a lot more than just addition and subtraction. Many fun to watch videos await you, us your sitewide password and start learning the best way to teach math today. 

Addition Home page
Addends Lessons
Basic Addition Lessons
How to Teach Addition

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Teaching Addition With Base Ten Blocks In The Classroom:

Crewton Ramone In The Classroom.
Crewton Ramone Using Base Ten Blocks In The Classroom.

“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” ~William Arthur Ward

“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” ~Aristotle

“The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher.” ~ Elbert Hubbard

“I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” ~Albert Einstein

"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play." ~Heraclitus

"It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. ” ~D.W. Winnicott, British pediatrician 1896–1971

"I believe that those boys who take part in rough, hard play outside of school will not find any need for horse-play in school. ” ~Theodore Roosevelt, 1858–1919