Making Ten with SNAKES {Printable Math Activity}

Here’s a fun making ten math activity that is perfect for kindergarten and first grade! Let’s build SNAKES that are made out of numbers that add up to 10.

It’s so true that kids need to memorize the addition facts. Knowing all the addition facts gives kids speed and confidence in higher level math. But there are so many reasons to that it’s particularly necessary to quickly recognize the pairs of addends that give a sum of 10.

Adding a column of numbers is so much easier when you can spot the tens.

Mental addition and subtraction is easier when you can quickly think in terms of tens.

Handling money is easier when you know all the pairs of addends that make ten.

Learning math facts is more fun when it feels like play, so let’s build some snakes!

This printable math activity has two parts:

Snake heads
Snake body segments

Print the pages from the file (you can download it below) and cut them out. I would recommend printing on card stock for durability, and if you’re using these with a class you might want to laminate the pieces.

My kids thought the snakes should have tongues, and they do truly look more snakelike with their little tongues red! However, if you don’t want to bother cutting around all those tongues, you can just cut them off.

Once you have everything cut out, it’s time to build snakes!

There are snake heads with all the numbers 1 – 9. Kids can decide which head they want to start with.

Then they can use the snake body segments cards like dominoes to create a chain. So if you have the head with 4 on it, you should look for a card with a 6 so that you have a sum of 10.