Pete The Cat Subtraction

We have been working on subtraction for the last few weeks. I am just starting to discover the Pete The Cat books (I know I am WAY late to the game!!)  This week we read Pete The Cat and His 4 Groovy Buttons. I found this great freebie from the aptly named Peterson's Pad. I pulled out my button math manipulatives and let the kids model the word problems using the buttons.

Next we made this cute craft. I let them decide how many of Pete's buttons were going to pop off and they wrote the number sentence to match.  We just used short strips of paper with an accordion fold to get the buttons to "pop off".