Here’s the last ‘1 more’ activity we have been using this week as our introduction to adding. I’ve not used the numicon to explore ‘1 more’ before, but the set we have at school has lots of extra ‘1’ pieces, so I thought I would give it a go. This activity was not quite as structured as the previous 4, but the idea was that students would put a numicon piece on their board, add 1 more and then count to see how many there were now. I would say we had more exploration than following the procedure, but that’s no bad thing.
I really enjoy teaching adding for the first time, because it marks the difference between learning about the numbers to 10, to actually working with them and having a go at mathematical processes. I made a decision to familiarise the children with the concept by working with concrete materials and talking about experiences either based on this exploration or real life situations. I think this will make a big difference as we try to move towards the more abstract and learning an efficient process to add that mirrors these early play based experiences.