The Number Bond

The Number Bond
Posted on 11/06/2019
The Number BondHello there STEM families! This time around, the math focus is the number bond!

At this point, chances are pretty good that no matter what grade your student is in, they have worked with a number bond in math. In Eureka, number bonds are used to help students visualize the part-whole relationships between numbers.

Kindergarteners might start by putting objects in their number bonds and moving them to show the parts like this:

Number Blocks

5 can be made up of 3 and 2 or 4 and 1. Once they have the hang of that, they’ll be writing numbers in those circles, instead of moving objects or drawing pictures.

In first and second grades, students start to use number bonds to show place value.

Number Blocks

In third grade, I’ve seen some students expanding their number bonds to show multiplication.

Number blocks

4 x 5 = 20

By the 4th and 5th grades, students can even use number bonds to help them reason about addition of fractions! You can read a really detailed explanation of this, along with an even more information about number bonds, in this blog post from greatminds.org: The Number Bond: A K-5 Model That Fosters Number Sense.