My daughter is having some math issues. This gives me great grief as I am pretty proficient mathematically. I’m very visual and it was driving me nuts every time she would add 5 + 1 by starting with 1,2,3,4,5…….. 6! The number one reason for this is simple… well, she’s in Kindergarten. She turned six after the “Birthday Cut off” for public school. THEY say she’s in Kindergarten, I say she’s almost in First Grade. Doesn’t matter now, she’s home schooled… I can teach her whatever I want. SHE wanted to learn addition. She did okay with it, once I convinced her that 2 + 2 was NOT 22!

It wasn’t until we purchased the “Hooked on Math: Addition” workbooks that I realized the concept I was trying to teach her actually had a name: Counting Up. They put a little line on the top of her work book pages that had the numbers 1-20 on top. She could put her finger on “2″ and count up 2 more numbers to get the answer 4…

We started using her ruler as our number line for all of our math worksheets. Worked well until we had 8 + 9. Her ruler stops at 12. So I created a “counting up” chain for her to use. The instructions are below: