Subtraction

I woke up yesterday to find that my wife J is about to lose her patience while teaching my son Z. Z will be taking his Math exams tomorrow so they were reviewing. When I saw the tension, I volunteered to be the one to teach Z. When I sat with him, I was amazed at the scope of the exam that my baby Z has to take. This is his first year in school – and I find it overwhelming that he has so much advanced topics (compared to mine) to review on. Anyway I tried to think of ways on how he can subtract on his own. At first we tried the finger counting approach, but he is having a hard time closing the fingers that needs to be subtracted. So what we did was we used 25 centavo coins, and we imagined that the coins were people and that the place mat was the jeep. Each subtraction simply means that a passenger went down. He easily got the logic. Then I had him draw the circles on paper then mark down the number to be subtracted. This worked for him and hopefully will help him answer his exam.