Strategies to Solve Addition and Subtraction

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Children can enhance their understanding of difficult addition and subtraction problems, when they learn to recognize how the combination of two or more numbers demonstrate a total (Fuson, Clements, & Beckmann, 2011). As students advance from Kindergarten through second grade they learn various strategies to solve addition and subtraction problems. The methods can be summarize into three distinctive categories called count all, count on, and recompose (Fuson, Clements, & Beckmann, 2011). The strategies vary faintly in simplicity and application. I will demonstrate how students can apply the count all, count on, and recompose strategies to solve addition and subtraction problems involving many levels of difficulty.
Counting all is the base that serves as the foundation for the development of the other strategies. Count all introduces students in Kindergarten to the concept of creating a total by counting all the numbers once the two amounts have been represented by a drawing or fingers (Common Core Standards Writing Team, 2011). Simultaneously, the count on strategy draws from the knowledge acquire as the student progress on the count all method. For this approach, students learn to determine the total of the two addends by counting on from any of the addends. Lastly, students can use a recomposing strategy. The recomposing strategy encourages students to discover the sum by creating sets of numbers that equal the original digit, but are easier to manage. For instance, creating doubles or tens out of odd numbers.
The first problem I created was a join add to result unknown. The problem reads, Carlos collected 8 toy cars. His mom gave him 7 more cars. How many toy cars does Carlos have in all? This problem prompts students to joi...

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...; K–5, operations and algebraic

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