First Grade Math Worksheets and Activities

Destiny Baby has finished Kindergarten and what a year it was! One take away lesson (among many) from Kindergarten is the importance of working with your child at home to reinforce the lessons learned in class. We had reading sessions every evening, used the First in Math online program for computerized math instruction (the school adopted it to motivate children to study and excel in Mathematics) and worked with Destiny Baby and his teacher to finish assignments and create additional learning opportunities away from school. We learned that once your child goes to school, you also become a student all over again!

(See our post on teaching math to toddlers and preschoolers.)

Now it is summertime. In addition to fun camps and classes Destiny Baby is taking this summer, we are also thinking about first grade preparation. He already worked through an activity booklet his teacher gave him. He also reads regularly, continues to do the First in Math activities online, and completes other workbook activities.

While I occasionally purchase workbooks for Destiny Baby, I also like to create lessons at home using resources online, especially downloadable printables and those from Eric Resources Information Center (ERIC), the Federal government’s freely searchable database of thousands of educational guides, studies, reports and more. The site also features curriculum materials and resources for parents. I found resources for teaching first grade math and you will find them below. Enjoy!

First Grade Math Worksheets

First Grade Math Worksheets – Addition and Subtraction

Adding and Equation Worksheets Using Pictures

Easy Addition Worksheets

Addition Worksheet – Five-Minute Drill

Subtraction Worksheets

Teach Kids About Tens and Ones

Graphs and Charts Worksheets

Counting Money Worksheets

Odd and Even Numbers

Greater Than and Less Than Worksheets

Research shows that children learn how to add and subtract through a set hierarchy of strategies, starting with counting one by one to mental mathematics using basic math facts and place value.

Doubling Numbers Made Easy – Activities for Parents and Kids

The biggest early transition kids make is to go beyond counting by one to using other strategies to manipulate numbers. (With Destiny Baby just having finished kindergarten, we are right at that crucial juncture. He is just beginning to be able to think about numbers beyond just counting but it is a challenge. The exercises in the handout, Doubling Made Easy, provide a range of activities parents can do at home with children to teach the concept of doubling.

This pdf handout of First Grade math activities parents can do with children using resources around the house, is excerpted from the book, “Preschool through 2nd Grade Learning Activities Design for Parents to Make and Play with Children.” Activities include counting, matching, addition, subtraction, sorting, measurement and fractions.

Place Value Fundamentals

Cuisenaire Rods

Place value is one of the most fundamental concepts for beginning learners to master in order to advance in mathematics learning and understanding. This pdf, Place Value: How Children Learn It and How To Teach It, is a comprehensive guide on Place Value, tracing its origins in the Hindu-Arabic numeric system, describing the common difficulties children face in understanding it, and giving details on 12 teaching activities to do with young children. The activities use materials from home, but to do them all you will need two stalwart math tools used successfully by educators the world over to teach math to young kids: Cuisenaire Rods and Unifix Cubes.

Similar to the colored sticks used in Montessori, Cuisenaire rods came first, invented by a Belgian Primary School teacher. Cuisenaire Rods feature multi-colored wooden or plastic sticks of varying lengths that match up in length. They are great for showing fractions, for example, as three small white rods might equal to one long blue rod and so forth. The Unifix Cubes are multi-colored connecting blocks that help to easily illustrate math problems. For example, you might have a flash card with an arithmetic problem on it, say 4 + 3. Your child could stack four and three Unifix cubes and get the answer. In reviews on Amazon, people love the cubes and describe the various ways they use them for homeschooling or to supplement classroom teaching. One person even uses the cubes to teach molecular chemistry!

Here is a picture of the Unifix Cubes:

And the Cuisenaire Rods: