Addition was a subject in which I honestly thought that my class would have a harder time picking up than they truly did. They LOVED addition. We made it into as many stories as you possibly could with addition. Ducks, food, people, superheros, princesses, frogs, fireflies, etc. BUT the favorite of the favorites were two different lessons. The first favorite was with addition to the number 5. I introduced the class to the story, “Five Little Monkeys”. After doing it a couple of times, the entire class was singing the song with me. We decided to make our class into real life manipulative, putting out a “bed” paper and having 5 little monkeys jump on our bed. By demonstrating with students, everyone was able to get a tangible experience from something that could be difficult to understand conceptually.

With the next lesson, we learned about ten penguins. I had picked this book up on a trip to the Utah Hogle Zoo. I showed the class pictures of the penguins from the zoo, and we discussed the different ways to make ten as we read the book. They were so excited, and we were even able to use penguin manipulatives to organize our thoughts for finding the number pairs of ten.