Working with or Reviewing Addition Facts with Spielgaben

Math skills are learned best through hands-on activities with many opportunities for practice and review. Spielgaben has a math workbook series to add extension activities for anyone who owns the complete Spielgaben set. I want to show some ideas for combining the workbook series with hands-on work using the Spielgaben materials. Today, I’m focusing on working with or reviewing addition facts.

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Spielgaben. All opinions are honest and my own.

Complete Spielgaben Set, Version 4

In case you’re not familiar with Spielgaben toys, they are exceptionally high-quality educational toys designed for ages 3-12. You can see from the photo that the cabinet is very high quality and fits in well in a room with traditional Montessori materials. I love the easily removable drawers in version 4.

The Spielgaben complete set comes with over 700 pages of full-color printed learning materials. These printed materials help you as a parent or teacher easily use Spielgaben toys educationally with your child and/or students.

Note: The yarn balls in set 1 are fine for babies and toddlers. The other sets should only be used with ages 3 and older unless your toddler no longer mouths objects or you are constantly supervising your toddler during an activity using the materials.

Spielgaben Math Workbook Series

If you own a complete Spielgaben Set, you can now order an optional extension resource: a set of math workbooks for Preschool/Kindergarten through Grade 6. These don’t have as many direct hands-on activities as the original printed learning materials (or digital materials if you have an earlier Spielgaben set). Some of the activities are hands-on, but this is a workbook series with mainly paper and pencil work illustrated with Spielgaben materials. Year 3 on up has answer pages in the back.

You can use the math workbooks in a homeschool however you prefer. You could work straight through them after using the original hands-on lessons, combine workbook activities with hands-on lessons from the original printed materials, or skip around, using the workbooks as needed to reinforce work from the hands-on materials. I like to skip around and review lessons from the original printed materials at the same time as I use a workbook page.

Spielgaben Materials Used in This Post

For this post, I used parts from Spielgaben cabinet drawers 1,  7, 8, 9, and 10. With younger children, I like to set up a tray or basket with the parts needed for a particular activity (as a control of error). For kindergarteners on up, I just have the child bring the drawers needed for the activities to the work area.

For the first part of the activity, I used the original Spielgaben Math Guide, pages 21-22. The full-color printed materials have lots of creative, hands-on activities for learning math concepts.

Addition Review with Spielgaben Materials

My 5½-year-old granddaughter, Zoey, has done lots of Montessori hands-on math work along with Spielgaben hands-on math activities. She can write all her numerals, understands place value, and knows addition and subtraction facts. She just started first grade, so we used the Spielgaben materials for an addition review before school started.

This activity from the original Spielgaben Math Guide was a favorite of Zoey’s before. While the adult typically hides some the 10 wooden dots used, I like to take turns with Zoey. She especially enjoys hiding the dots and having me guess how many are hidden under the cup. (We used a silicon baking cup, although almost any type of cup or glass can be used.)

After playing the hidden dots game, Zoey completed two pages in the Math Workbook, Year 1. The workbook typically uses Spielgaben creations as the illustrations, so they’re fun as building inspiration. I always encourage Zoey to build one of the images with the Spielgaben materials.

After her building work, Zoey easily completed page 13 about adding two groups. The top problems simply show two groups of Spielgaben creations to be added together. The bottom two problems allow more hands-on creativity when the child creates his or her own objects with Spielgaben materials to solve the problems.

Zoey’s 21-month-old sister, Sophia, had been looking at books. She came over to look at her book and watch Zoey’s work for the next part. Again, Zoey built one of the images using Spielgaben materials.

Page 14 introduces (or reviews) the addition symbols and works with addition sentences. These were simple for Zoey to complete and made a quick review of addition with some fun building work on the side.

The workbook covers a wide variety of first grade math concepts. It works well as an extension of the Spielgaben printed lessons. It’s also helpful for children who need extra work with a specific concept.

All My Spielgaben Posts

Many of these include links to free printables! (Click on an image to go to the related blog post. The gallery is ordered according to publication date with my latest post at the top.)

Version 4 of Spielgaben Educational Toys 

I highly recommend Spielgaben as an amazing educational material for home or school. Even though the toys aren’t inexpensive, they’re definitely worth the price because of the high quality of materials and number of years your children or students can use them.

Special deal for my readers!