Make Ten Race
One number shows. Tap what it needs to make ten.
For grown-ups
- How long: 5 to 10 minutes is plenty. Short and frequent beats long and occasional — the early-numeracy trials with the largest effects ran eight weeks or less.
- The strategy to reinforce: “Fill the frame” — Count the empty spaces in the ten-frame — that is the number you need. If they stall, remind them of this rather than giving the answer.
- When they get one wrong: the page shows the working. Read it together rather than moving straight on. Feedback that explains is worth several times more than feedback that only marks right or wrong, and that gap is wider in maths than in any other subject.
- On the timer: it is off unless you turn it on, and it is never needed. Use it only once the skill is comfortable, never to introduce it.
- Print it too: doing the same problems on paper a few days later is worth more than doing twice as many today.
What this practises
Instant recall of the pairs that make ten.
Automaticity on the pairs to ten frees working memory for everything built on top of them. This is short and repetitive on purpose: retrieval practice, not explanation, is what moves a fact from worked out to known.
- The underlying idea
- Automaticity on pairs to ten frees working memory for everything built on them.
- Where this sits in Illustrative Mathematics
- 1st grade Unit 3: Adding and Subtracting Within 20
- Sources
- Fuchs et al. (2012) · Codding et al. (2011) · van der Kleij et al. (2015) all references →
Related measured skill: ARF · Addition facts. What this means