2-Digit Addition with Carrying

This worksheet is pure two-digit column addition with carrying. Every problem is stacked vertically — ones over ones, tens over tens — and every problem overflows: the ones column adds up past nine, so the child must regroup. Above each problem waits a small dashed carry box, the official parking spot for the carried ten. Add the ones, write the ones digit below, tuck the 1 into its dashed box, then add the tens column including that carried 1.

Carrying is the moment column addition starts meaning something. When 8 and 7 make 15, the child is really discovering that fifteen ones are worth one ten and five ones — and the little 1 traveling to the tens column is that trade made visible. The dashed carry boxes on this page are there to keep the trade honest: a carried ten scribbled in a random corner gets forgotten or double-counted, but a carry with a fixed home gets used exactly once. Saying the trade aloud on the first few problems — 'fifteen: five stays, one ten moves over' — turns a mechanical habit into place-value understanding that will hold up under three-digit numbers later.

The sheet prints free as a PDF and suits a talk-one-then-solo routine. Its mirror image is 2-digit subtraction with borrowing, where the trade runs the other way, and when both directions feel steady, 3-digit addition with carrying raises the ceiling.