• Students will understand basic number addition.

• Review counting from 1-20 forwards and backwards.
• Use students as ‘counters’. Gather 2 groups of students in front of room- one group of three, one group of two. Propose situational question “These three friends like to eat apples, and these two friends like to eat oranges. How many students in all like to eat fruit?” (five) Work similar problems when teaching subtraction.

• Define terms together at the board: addition, addend, sum
• Discuss key words for addition: in all, altogether, total, sum.
• Key words for subtraction: how many more, difference, fewer
• Practice several groupings, demonstrating with counters at the overhead. 

Practice

• Give students each an individual bag of colored candies, crackers, or counters.  Ask how many are orange? Green? Add them together.  How many orange plus green altogether?  How many are purple? How many are there in all?  How many more green are there than purple?
• Continue probing questions of students with their counters. 
• Practice writing these in number sentence form: 2+4=6; 5+8=13; 12-7=5

• Group students in mixed ability pairs
• Ask student pairs to create an addition or subtraction problem that can be solved using their counters. 
• Pairs of students work together to create problems for each other and solve.
• Share problems orally. 

• Challenge students to create a situational story problem to go with an addition or subtraction sentence.

Ex: 8-3=5. (My cat had a litter of 8 kittens. We have sold 3 of them, so we have 5 kittens left.)

4+1=5. (I have 4 brothers in addition to myself. There are 5 children total in my family.)