Addition with Desserts and Sweets — Kindergarten

Two questions take turns down this sheet. One row asks how many cupcakes, lollipops and a pie there are altogether when a group is joined to a written number; the next shows the whole and one part, and asks what the other part must be to make it. Counting up to a total and breaking a total back into parts are two sides of the same understanding, and meeting both with the same pictured sweet treats helps five- and six-year-olds see how they fit together.

Seeing that a handful of sweet treats can be split into a few here and a few there — and that those parts rebuild the whole — is the number-bond idea at the centre of kindergarten arithmetic. The adding rows and the find-the-part rows practise the two directions of that bond, and keeping the amounts inside ten means a child can rebuild or take apart any total by counting.

Children who like desserts and sweets enjoy the change of pace from row to row, and it works well for a small group ready to think in more than one direction. When the numbers feel easy, count a fresh group in addition with dinosaurs, or try addition with flowers. You can also browse every addition worksheet or the whole sweet treats collection for kindergarten — each sheet prints cleanly in black and white or plays online for free.