Addition and subtraction facts are not memorised in one push. Children move through a sequence — first making sense of small quantities, then combinations of 10, then doubles, then the derived facts that hang off both. A game that lands perfectly in second grade is often useless in kindergarten, not because it is too hard but because it drills something a child has already automated.
This is the order we would teach in, and the games that fit each stage.
Kindergarten: making 5 and making 10
Before any child can add fluently, they need to see small quantities without counting them and know which pairs make 5 and 10. Everything later depends on this.
- Game 1 Sleeping Bears — hide bears in a cave and work out how many are sleeping, using a five or ten frame
- Game 7 Sleeping Bears — the ten-frame version, with a recording sheet for writing each combination
- Game 8 Go Fish for 10s — Go Fish where you hunt for pairs that make 10
First grade: counting on, doubles, and the teen numbers
Once combinations of 10 are secure, children need to stop counting from one. Counting on and doubles are the two strategies that get them there.
- Game 2 Bears Race to 10 and Game 3 Bears Race to 0 — number line races for the +1, +2 and −1, −2 facts
- Game 5 Doubles Match-up — match real-world doubles pictures to their equations
- Game 6 Doubles Bingo — whole-class doubles practice
- Game 10 Square Deal — adding a single digit to 10, which is how the teen numbers get built
Second grade: missing addends and subtraction as difference
This is where subtraction usually goes wrong. Children who only ever meet subtraction as taking away struggle later; framing it as difference and as a missing addend is what prevents that.
- Game 19 Salute — cards on foreheads, work out your own from the sum. The best missing-addend game there is
- Game 18 Diffy Dozen — roll two dice, find the difference, take that many counters
- Game 20 Target Difference — hunt your hand for two cards a given distance apart
- Game 21 Subtraction Stacks — place counters, then roll differences to remove them
Third grade and beyond: fluency under pressure, and flexibility
By this point the facts should be largely automatic. What is still worth practising is speed, and the flexibility to combine numbers in more than one way.
- Game 12 Sum War — War, where accuracy beats magnitude
- Game 11 Lucky 13 — pick two cards from four to land closest to 13
- Game 9 Erase — spot every combination of 10 among seven dice
- Game 22 Around the House and Game 24 First to 20 — multi-step reasoning with a target
Getting the whole set
All 24 addition and subtraction games are available together in the Addition/Subtraction collection, or as the Addition/Subtraction Bundled Game. Almost all of them run on the same short list of materials — a deck of cards, some dice, and a tub of counters.