Today we are going to work on addition again, using toy cars if you have them. If you do not have toy cars, any type of counter (coins, cubes, blocks etc) can be used – pretend they are cars!  You will need to draw a car park template, similar to the one shown below and either two dice, or your set of number cards (to 10).

Roll a dice or turn over a number card . Ask your child to drive that many cars (or counters) into the car park. Repeat with the other dice, or turn over another number card. Ask your child to drive that many cars into the car park. The example below shows 4 cars and 2 cars being put in the car park.

Ask your child to write out the calculation and work out the answer by counting all the cars in the car park.

Remove the cars and start again.

Repeat a number of times until your child is confident to complete the task independently or with minimal support.

Cheeky Challenge!! To extend this task, you could ask your child to complete the first part of the activity (so adding the two lots of cars to find the total) But, they don’t write out the addition, simply write the number showing the total.  In the first example above the total was 6. They then repeat the activity and again work out the total (in the second example given, the total was 8) They then use these two numbers in their calculation, eg  6 + 8 = 14. They have worked out the total numbers of cars in the car park altogether.