Tonight I took a few minutes to film the steps that we are teaching when subtracting. You may be asking, "Why are we doing so many steps when my student knows the math fact 16-8=8?" We are setting the foundation for working with bigger numbers. If students can see the pattern of subtracting from the tens (if we don't have enough ones) or the ones (if there are more ones than we are subtracting), they can apply it quickly to bigger numbers by just adding in the extra groups of 10.
Students only need to have an understanding of numbers to 10!
I told the kids today, "THIS IS HARD WORK!" We are stretching our brains to work through the problem. Please encourage your student to dig deep and use their grit - I promise the pay off will be BIG!