Properties of Addition and Math Games

Man, this past week was just crazy busy. I have been wanting to sit down and blog for several days, but I haven't even had time to scratch my head!

Anyway, last week we talked about properties of addition. I found a great flipchart on promethean planet (it's at the bottom of the link page) to introduce the properties and then Friday, we used dice to model the commutative and associative properties.

I had them draw a T chart with one side labeled commutative property and the other associative property. We spent about 10 minutes rolling two dice and writing the numbers two ways. Example: you roll a 5 and a 4. Students would then write 5 + 4 = 4 + 5 or you can have them write 5 + 4 = 9 and 4 +5 = 0.

After practicing the commutative property, we rolled three dice and worked on the associative property. Example: you roll 4, 3, and 1. Students would write (4 + 3) + 1 = 4 + (3 + 1) or they could write (4 + 3) + 1 = 8 and 4 + (3 + 1 ) = 8.

We didn't do much with the Indentity Property the second day everyone understood the idea that when you add 0 to a number, it stays the same.

Here is a link to some addition and subtraction games to help your students work on different skills. The only gameboard I don't have in the file is the Spin a Number board. I will try to scan it next week and post it for you kinder teachers.

These are some great Computer games for helping your kids practice addition and subtraction.