I’ve got a request today. I want to ask all educators out there to stop saying make 10. Now, I know that making 10 is a huge deal in elementary school. It is a big, big thing that we need kids to understand. However, the term “make 10” makes it very difficult for kids to extend beyond making 10. In my eyes, really, it’s not about making 10, but about making it friendly.

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• Rekenreks/MathRacks: https://mathrack.com/
• Add-A-Row Rekenrek/MathRack: https://mathrack.com/products/mathrack-add-a-row-12-row/
• Magnetic Ten Frames: https://amzn.to/2E23HSW

Why You Should Call It ‘Make It Friendly’ Instead Of ‘Make 10’

Making 10 is typically seen as an early elementary idea, which is one of the reasons why I want to get rid of it. Because this idea spans beyond those early grades. So if you’re an upper grades educator, stick around because this pertains to you as well.

Alright, so the general idea is that we want to help kids make it friendly. Now making numbers friendly pertains beyond the whole make a 10 strategy that tends to be seen as kind of a kindergarten, first-grade thing. But when we call it “make it friendly”, that idea, that strategy, will stay with them and last in everything that they’re going to be doing around mathematics. If you can make a problem friendly, it makes mathematics so much nicer.

Let’s take a look at a few examples here.

Let’s start with this idea of nine plus seven. Addition facts are kind of where it all starts.

We try to help kids make a 10 because making a 10 makes it nicer. So if they can chunk off one from the seven, give it to the nine, then they can make a 10 and six. And 10 and six is a much nicer problem.

I kind of almost gave it away there, but I like to say it’s friendlier. Kids love that term friendly versus talking about benchmark numbers. I’m big about benchmark numbers, but that’s not really a kid term. So when you’re talking about it with students, I like to talk about it as make it friendly.

Because, as they move forward and they’re doing make it friendly, then, as it extends into multi-digit addition, something like 299 plus 357, that problem, a lot of our students who only learned make a 10, make a 10, make a 10, they don’t see how this problem can make a 10.

Yes, we want kids to understand that they are really making a 10, but it’s a whole lot easier transition if we can help them just make it friendly. What is a friendly number that we could maybe move one of those numbers too? And when we talk about it in that way, they can quickly see that 300 would make this so much friendlier.

Then, even as we advance into decimals, it’s no longer making it a 10. Again, if you want to be technical, yes, we are making a 10 somewhere in here, but every time we make a 10, it makes it friendly, which is the point I want to get across here, is that making a 10 limits our kids’ thinking and it stunts them to think I always have to make a 10.

But they aren’t really making a 10 in a lot of these situations, in their eyes. So here, it’s a whole lot nicer if we could make this friendly by making the 3.99 into 4. All we have to take is .01 off of the .17.

Now we’ve got 4 and .16. That makes it so much more friendly and we didn’t really make a 10 in the kid’s eyes. That’s why it’s so hard for them to transfer that Make a 10 strategy.

If you’ve ever had that situation where you’re talking about Make a 10, and then they aren’t able to transfer it to new situations, it’s because they really aren’t seeing it as 10. When you talk about it as Make It Friendly, that becomes so much easier to transfer.

Now let’s even look as we move to fractions, because here’s an instance where we aren’t making a 10 but we could make one of those numbers friendly and that would make the problem so much nicer. We’ve got three and a half plus five and three-fourths.

So spoiler alert, I’m gonna talk about a way or two of how to make this friendly. Because if you’ve never really looked at fractions this way, this doesn’t come naturally.

But if we look at it and try to think about how could I make one of those friendly, some of you might want to make the five and three-fourths a nice number, a friendly number, because it’s really close to six, and all you need is just one-fourth more.

Now again, this is not a quick easy fix, because kids have to understand that in three and a half, there are some fourths. Three and a half is the same thing as three and two-fourths. So we have a lot of work with developing number sense and everything else that goes into helping kids really understand this concept, but the idea of make it friendly is I need a fourth so that I can turn the five and three-fourths into six, and if I understand that three and half is three and two-fourths, I can take one-fourth away and now I’ve made my number friendly. I have six and I’m left with three and a fourth. That is way nicer to add together.

Now some of you might have gone the other way and said well three and a half, if I just have another half, I could make four. And you know that a half is the same thing as two-fourths so you grab two-fourths from the five and three-fourths and you made the three and a half a four. It doesn’t matter how you made it friendly, guys, the idea is that when you make it friendly, the problem is so much nicer, it’s so much friendlier!

That’s why I like the term. It makes the problem friendlier to solve. So if you could make one of the numbers friendly, the world just opens up mathematically. And the other cool part that I love about this discussion when we’re talking about making it friendly is all the number sense that comes up because kids have to decide what would be friendly? Why is that friendly? Why is 300 friendly here, but four is friendly here?

So you get to build all of this kind of number sense around numbers that you don’t get to when we just say make a 10. Okay, now I hope I’ve made the case that I want you to move away from ‘Make a 10’ to ‘Make It Friendly’. Now I want to give you some ideas on how to help kids develop this in the classroom.

Two Big Things Around Make It Friendly

Number one is that the model that you choose to do these make a 10, or make it friendly, strategies does not matter.

I don’t care what your textbook is trying to get you to do, the model doesn’t matter. I have seen way too many kids get stuck on trying to fill out a number bond that they aren’t even paying attention to what the big idea is. They get so stuck in which number goes where inside of the number bond or maybe you’re using a part-part-whole model. Whatever model you’re using, the model doesn’t matter. The mathematics is what matters. They don’t even have to model it, they just need some way to write it.

Now in the previous examples that we’ve just talked about, I was just kind of saying it, I wasn’t showing a model for it, but the idea of a number bond is to show how the whole number can be broken apart into pieces, but that you could use those pieces to compose, and make a new amount.

So the general idea that you want to help kids understand is this idea of decomposing a number and then composing a number back together, and then, I don’t care if you use number bonds, if you just write it down as equations, it doesn’t matter, guys! The idea is the mathematics.

So free yourself if your textbook is having you do it in a particular model and the kids are just getting stuck on the model. It’s okay to not use that model and try something else.

The ideas we want them to see is they can break it apart, put some over here with the nine, and then make it friendly, and then what’s leftover you still have to add together. That’s it, that’s all we’ve got to do. That model does not matter.

Okay, the second thing is that I really want to encourage you to use that term “friendly,” and I already alluded to this, but I talk a lot about it as benchmark numbers because mathematicians talk about it in that way.

Math educators talk about benchmark numbers, but kids don’t often relate to that. So switching our terminology to friendly numbers, and you can interchange friendly/benchmark, I don’t really care, but you gotta start with making it friendly for kids. And friendly is a friendly term. 😉

I want to show you another little example, ’cause I just did addition stuff and the cool part about this whole friendly numbers, is that it applies as we’re doing all the operations. We can do subtraction, but I really wanted to hit home multiplication and division, because these are really sticking points for our upper grades kids, and when you can make it friendly and help them make the problem friendly, oh, it’s just so much nicer.

Let’s take a look at a typical fact, okay?

This applies to multi-digit too. So think about how it would apply to what you’re teaching now. But if we’re doing 7×8, a lot of times sevens are not friendly for our kids. Most of the time, kids think about this as seven groups of eight. Well doing seven groups of eight is not friendly. And you guys, yes we could just make them memorize, but again, it’s about building their math minds, not just creating calculators.

We want to build their thinking processes, and seven groups of eight is not very friendly, but in multiplication, there are certain multiplication facts that are friendly. Your twos, your fives, your 10’s. Kids gravitate towards those, and those are friendly.

So if I need seven groups of eight, I could do five groups of eight and two groups of eight, and put those together. So if we can help kids see how to make the problem friendly, it gives them another way to think about the problem.

As you move into division, this is one of my favorite ways of all times, that the moment I saw this it forever changed how I thought about mathematics.

When long division, our students are notoriously horrible with long division, especially when there’s that instance where there’s gonna be a zero in the quotient. Kids will often forget the zero, there’s just a whole lot of room for error in this whole long division thing. And it doesn’t build number sense, but if you help kids think about, “how could we make this friendly?”

The whole idea here is when we do long division typically what we teach kids is we set it up differently and we say how many times will two go into four? And then we multiply that, bring it down, subtract, all of that fun stuff, and then two into zero. They’ll say, no times and then forget to put their zero up there.

They go through this whole process, but if they look at it as the whole problem, this is really asking us 4064 divided by 2. Well, 4064 divided by 2 isn’t friendly, but guess what is? There are problems within that that are friendly.

4000 divided by 2 is super friendly. 60 divided by 2 is friendly. 4 divided by 2 is friendly. And if you do 4000 divided by 2, which is 2000; 60 divided by 2 which is 30, and then 4 divided by 2 which is 2, it’s 2032, right?

And I did that in my head. I often might show that sometimes in a number bond if kids are familiar with that. You could show each equation there and list it all out, and then the answer is right there for them. And I know some people often say, well, this is a lot of work!

Oh my gosh, guys, if you’ve ever taught long division, you know how difficult that is. And yes this is an easy problem, it’s a friendly problem, but you start with friendly problems so they get the idea of what division is about so that even as they move into more difficult problems they’re still looking for friendly chunks that they can pull out of that division problem.

Alright, some final tips about how to help make it friendly for your students.

Ways To Help Kids Make It Friendly

Now I am a big believer in visuals, but visuals that help emphasize relationships. So for the young grades, I really love rekenreks and Ten Frames because they emphasize those 10’s. And as you move into multiplication I even love the rekenreks where you can add a row and you can get up to 12 rows of 10, because it helps emphasize those friendly amounts. I even love putting multiplication inside of Ten Frames because it helps kids see groupings.

The whole idea is whatever visuals you’re using should help kids see groupings. And that’s another reason why I don’t really love the number bonds because it doesn’t help kids see the actual groupings. It’s just the abstract digits inside of the number bond.

My other favorite way is to do strings of problems. Now the whole idea of a string is you can do a string to lead into a certain strategy or you can do a string that helps emphasize a certain pattern or relationship.

Here’s a little string for addition that I might do with younger grades kids and as you notice every single one of them has a seven. The idea of this string is to talk about what can we break off to make the seven a friendly number.

We want kids to see that no matter what we’re adding to a seven you always want to chunk off a three. And I know some of you might get a little bothered with the bottom one where it says 7+9 because a lot of you want to break off a one and give it to the nine to make that friendly, but again, you guys, it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter which number they make friendly as long as they are making a number friendly.

And I would have that specific conversation with them about who wanted to break off one and move it over to the nine. Why did you want to do that? If we didn’t break some off and make the seven friendly, how would we make that friendly?

So we want to help them see that consistency so that we can move into a larger string with larger amounts as we’re moving into multi-digit addition to help them see that still if there’s a seven, anytime that there was a seven, we’re chunking off a three or something with a three, like the bottom one if I had made that 287, right? We wouldn’t just want a 3, we’d want a 13.

We want to help them see patterns and doing number strings is a great way to help them see those patterns in how we make problems friendly.

Well, I hope that this video has helped you build your math mind so that you can build the math minds of your students. And remember, it’s all about making it friendly, and if you want more friendly tips to help you build your students’ fluency with addition and multiplication.

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