Today I am going to share a cute little subtraction activity that I made up a couple of weeks ago that is similar to the Shark Teeth Addition that I made up last year, but this time uses kids rather than sharks and is for subtraction rather than addition! I hope you enjoy it as much as my kids did! There’s even a free download in it for you!
And if you are on vacation this week, then Happy Spring Break to you!!!! I, too, am very happily on Spring Break this week, and I have to say that it is SWEET!
My husband and I spent a couple of days on a little getaway in San Diego, and got to go to Sea World on one of our days away. We have been there lots of times, but it is always fun!
We also visited Balboa Park on the other day, and had a couple of nice dinners. Just the weather alone is worth the trip to San Diego!
For those of you that missed the Shark Teeth Addition activity, it was simply an addition lesson in which the children rolled dice or used a spinner to determine how many teeth to draw on the upper and lower jaws of the shark. Then they counted the total of the teeth and wrote an equation.
There are some worksheets that go with it. The first activity was a free download, and then we created more of them and made them available for purchase as the demand for them became known.
In my new Loose Tooth Subtraction Activity, we start with a picture of a child with ten teeth. Then we roll a die to see how many teeth the child would lose. We then black out that many teeth to show that they have been lost, and write the equation. This activity is not as open ended as the Shark teeth addition activity, because of the need to draw the teeth in from the very beginning, and them black them out. It seems to me that we could also use the triangle pattern blocks for teeth in the kids mouths, but I am afraid that they would end up looking like vampires or monsters, LOL!
The only trouble that we had with the activity was that the girls ALL insisted on having the picture of the little girl with the bow in her hair! So I went back into all of the drawings and added a bow to all of the girls’ heads so that this would no longer be an issue. We cannot have girls without a bow, now, can we?????
This activity was better for the children that were struggling with subtraction than those higher functioning children that were already transitioning well from doing addition exclusively. For those lower children, the fact that the first number was always ten made things simpler. In contrast, this made it a little more boring for the higher children. So for these children, I decided to make some pictures of kids with no teeth at all, and let them both draw the teeth and black them out as well. This leaves the equations much more open ended and allows more freedom for the teacher to challenge the children that learn a little faster.
Here’s a little song we also learned to go along with our unit on addition from the CD/DVD Musical Math. Heidi also has a song for subtraction, of course! You can hear a bit of it on iTunes here!
I hope you enjoy this free download! Meanwhile, here are a few other things that we did this past week!
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