I have had some great planning meetings lately with 3rd grade dealing with number bonds. The more I work with number bonds, the more I realize the important role they play in the part/whole relationships and composing and decomposing numbers.This leads me to my passion - helping students truly understand the math! Kids learn fact families, memorize multiplication facts, but do they truly understand the relationships? If a student doesn't understand to solve a missing addend problem like 8+ __ = 15 using subtraction, then I would say they don't truly understand.We must start our teaching with the concrete! We keep hearing CPA, CPA, CPA... but do you, as a teacher, approach each topic this way? The more you front load the learning with concrete/hands-on examples, the quicker and more in-depth the learning occurs. We have a couple schools in our district who have copies of Jana Hazekamp's Why Before How:Singapore Math Computation Strategies. I will post highlights of the book here for all to glean the knowledge from this easy to read, yet powerful book. I mentioned the important role number bonds play in composing and decomposing numbers, let's take a look how they impact this strategy.
Practice here