Subtraction Fact Strategies

Here is our chart of subtraction fact strategies. Please forgive my terrible handwriting. I have never mastered that perfect teacher handwriting. Again, I don't require students to use these strategies, but I do want to have some common names for strategies we can all refer to and some strategies to suggest when a student doesn't have a strategy in mind to use. My favorite strategy on this list is the "up to ten" strategy. It is a counting up strategy from the lower number. We ask ourselves how many up to ten, then how many after ten and add those two partial differences together to find the difference. This is great to demonstrate on a ten frame and/or number line. For example, for 15-8 I would think 8 + 2= 10, and 10+ 5=15, and 2 + 5=7, so 15-8=7. This is a powerful strategy because it helps kids with the facts they find most difficult and because it is transferable to larger numbers (25-18=7).

Some strategy names are from Bridges math program