Subtraction is so much fun to teach.....hahahahahaha!
Ok, sorry, had to get that out of my system.
My kids love "When You Subtract With a Pirate" video and for a few of my late bloomers it helped them come to their "ah-ha" moment.
I think next year I need to start practicing counting backwards sooner. My kinders ROCK at counting up which I give 99.9% credit to the fact that we count up all year long!
I use domino cards with my kids starting almost the 1st month of school. I hold a few of them up and the kids shout "dominoes" and then we run through a few cards.
We start simple with ones that look like this and start by counting all the dots:
Then we add harder ones like this:
Then we stop counting all the dots because some genius child figures out we don't need to count every dot sometimes our brain knows how many dots are in a cluster (Ok, I usually point that out to them but one day there will be a genius child who does it first!)
Once the big "ah-ha" moment arrives we start saying the "big" number and counting up!
We make a big deal out of NOT counting every dot. Using the card above as an example the conversation would go something like this:
Me: "Oh my goodness kindergarten, do we really need to count every dot?"
Kinders: NO!
Me: That's right! Don't waste your time counting dots when your brain already knows how many are in the cluster! How many are in our big cluster?
Kinders: 4
Me: Woohoo! Someone turned their math brain on HIGH! That's right, there are 4 dots in the big cluster. Let's count up!
Ready. . . 4, 5, 6!
(While they are counting I'll circle the "4" cluster with my finger and then touch the 2 other dots while we count.)
Usually we are doing this while waiting for a few straggling kinders to make it to the floor for story time or the line so we can leave the room. Quick time filler and voila. . . counting up skill. . .done!
BUUUUUT. . . . .every year about this time I realize (oops) forgot to practice counting down.
Next year I'll remember.
Probably.
