How to Add to a Number

We count the ten because we feel the numbers of our hands. Children also experience this feeling. And we must evoke the sense of number through transition from the whole to parts. After teaching children to count in this way, something else becomes important. We must not proceed to addition in a dead, mechanical way by mere adding one item to another in series. One does not harness a horse with its tail to the front likewise when teaching arithmetic. We start from a hole actually present in the total and then separate it into parts.