Number bonds

We have been rockin and rollin in first grade math so far this year. One of the first things I do when we hit our addition chapter in our math book is pull out the number bonds. This is such a great way to see who has an understanding of part-part-whole from Kindergarten and also a great way to teach it if that foundation isn't already there.  We've been using the Guiding Firsties Math Units by Deanna Jump and Deedee Wills (which I absolutely LOVE) and they come along with some great math mats including these number bonds and related facts.

Please excuse the glare on these pictures, I was using my phone :)

The first thing I had them do was to give everyone a whole and have them show me different ways to break that whole into parts. We used 2 color counters to show different parts. (Somehow I didn't manage to get a picture of this step)

After they were comfortable with that, I gave everyone dice and we started rolling to make parts and wholes.  First I had them roll 2 dice to be the parts, and add them together to get their whole. Then they wrote a corresponding number sentence on the number bond.

Next I had them pick a whole, roll 1 dice to make 1 part, and use counters or count on to find the other part. This was a little more tricky, but these guys had such a great sense of numbers and comfort using number bonds from their Kindergarten classes that they breezed right through!

After a day of playing with our number bonds and exploring part part whole from a variety of different angles, we started talking about "related facts" and we moved onto this mat:

I love these mats because they tie in the different parts, number bonds, and related facts in one fell swoop.  

We are getting ready to start adding 3 numbers later this week and I'm going to pull out these mats. (You can read about how we used them last year in this post)