Balancing Equations- First Grade Style!

    

It  has been a LONG time since I have been back to the blog friends! I have some good stuff for you today though.  Two weeks ago my little Owlets began learning about balancing equations DUH DUH DUHHHHHHHHH.  It's a really hard concept for them to grasp so I tried to start out as basic as I could.  We began with adding.  The students found the sum of some pumpkin shaped problems and colored them orange if they equaled 10 and blue if they equaled 11.  This was to show them that different numbers can have the same sum.

The little owlets who this paper belongs to is one of my best artists! Aren't those pumpkins beautiful?

The second activity the students did was finding and matching equal equations.  Equations that had the same sum.  Here is a page from my printable pack that you can get in my TPT store.

Then we moved on to true and false equations.  All in addition still.  However subtraction and mixed subtraction and addition is soon to come.  

     I find that it is extremely important to expose the students to a variety of number sentence types.  The students automatically think that if the sum precedes the addends that it is a false equation.  In order to help them know that it's ok to write a number sentence in various ways, they need to see it and have it explicitly told that it's ok. So that way when you get to equations that have no answer space at all they aren't wide-eyed and surprised! If they do then it's time to reteach some things.

    We use ten frames to find missing numbers in small problems.  Then we work our way up to double-digit numbers to 20.

    Whew! That’s a lot to do in such a short amount of time!  Check out my Operations and Algebraic Expressions bundle in my SHOP.