Teaching Number Bonds: Top Tips

Hi, I'm Claire and I'm going to give you some more top tips about how to teach those number bonds. Here's a great resource. It's so easy to make. I've just got an ordinary coat hanger here and I'm going to show some number bonds up to 10. You could actually start with number bonds up to 5 before you move on to number bonds up to 10. And I've just put on here some ordinary coat pegs. I've got here, some four over here. And an immediate question to ask children is, If I have four, how many more do I need to make 10? If they don't know the answer, it's easy to count up the pegs. A great thing about this coat hanger is when you know that 4 and 6 make 10. You can then turn your coat hanger around and go, now I've got six, how many more do I need to make 10? And they can see it's very visual. I've got six and four and four and six. They are, you know, the number ones up to 10. So you can have a lot of fun playing around with this and get your children to quiz each other. Let's look at what else we could use. Now, I've got a tens frame here. Now these are very useful to start off with. If you've got some counters that are two colours. I've started just by putting two red ones on here. I could say, if I've got two red counters, how many more do I need to make 10? And you could have your learning partner with the yellow counters who has to put them on and work it out. Maybe they could have a guess before they put the counters on, how many they think it's going to be. Then they can put the counters onto the frame and find out what happens. Next thing you could do is turn your frame around. If I've got two over here, how many more am I going to need to make 10? Makes them think, has it actually changed? Is it going to be the same number? Keep playing lots of games like this so that they are really secure in what numbers actually add up together to make 10. Once you've done that, you can start to move on to larger numbers. Here we have an example of a really good bar model. We're making numbers up to 20. And I've got, over here, this is a great bar model to Show I have 8, how many more do I need to make 20? I always use bead strings and things when I'm doing this because you can see straight away. I've got 10 white and 10 red here. So. So I know altogether I've got the same number of beads as you've got in that top of that bar model. I want to make 20. Now, so far I've got eight. And the children, if they're securing their number bonds up to 10, should be able to easily move those eight to one side, knowing that eight and two make 10. So then I've got two red, 10 white ones, got 12, and now I can put it into my bar model to show the answer. Here we are. Another good thing about using a bar model is you can then turn this around. You could then draw underneath a bar with 12 on it and say, how many would be more would I need to make 20 again? Keep showing them that if you turn those number bonds round it, it's the same two number bonds that will make the same number. I hope you have a lot of fun with this to, you know, keep playing games and explore all the different things that you can do to reinforce their understanding of number bonds.