Counting down

Looked at with an adult eye, subtraction is pretty much the same thing as addition, it's just counting backwards. But for the child, subtraction can be very confusing. It starts with the plethora of different names that the operation carries. Subtraction is not only called subtraction, but also: taking away, difference, and minus, which doesn't make life any more straightforward.
Children also find counting backwards difficult. It was not always thus. In the early 1960s many children learnt to count down from 10 before they learnt to count up to 10, such was the effect of the space race on their imaginations. Needless to say, it wasn't in school that they learnt to do this, it was in play. Also back in the 1960s TV and radio used to play the "Hit Parade" which typically counted down either the top 10 or the top 20 all the way to "Number 1", the best selling song of the week. Neither of these are a fixture in today's children's lives, as a consequence they don't learn to count backwards, and that makes subtraction more difficult for them. It's a good idea to play rocket launching with young children so that they learn to count backwards. At Puppet Maths, we involve children in playing rocket launching specifically to teach this important skill.