Our “Teaching Planning” math project was to make a video of us teaching math to a child at a level and age appropriate to the level we want to teach. We had the privilege of working with a beautiful first grader named Melanie Rodriguez. As part of our lesson and as a tool to introduce Melanie to subtraction, we read "Monster Musical Chairs," a book that tells the story of six clumsy monsters who play musical chairs. The game started with music, six monsters and five chairs. As the game progresses, chairs and monsters are eliminated one by one, until only one monster and one chair remain. The goals of our lesson were for Melanie to learn to subtract using manipulatives, to communicate understanding verbally and through the use of manipulatives, and also to demonstrate a couple of counting strategies. Once we finished reading the story, we followed up with a series of questions to see if Melanie had understood what we had read. In order for Melanie to learn about subtraction and be able to connect it to "Monster Musical Chairs", we use manipulatives for the teaching portion of our lesson. The monsters were made of pompoms and our chairs were squares cut out of foam paper. We used two models to teach Melanie subtraction; takeaway template and number line. Melanie was asked to place a number of monsters (pompoms) and a number of chairs (foam squares) on two sets of circles we provided. Each time, she was asked to tell us how many were in each circle, and then to take away a number of monsters, chairs, or both. Melanie did this several times, each time taking away a different number of monsters and chairs. Our second teaching method was the number lin… in the center of the paper… Mom said, “Well, I'm glad you're doing something with subtraction. Struggle with subtraction. However, as you can see from the video, she looked amazing and showed no signs of struggling. I think the way the manipulatives were introduced with the lesson plan made something click for her. The thing I would keep unchanged is the creation of monsters. I noticed that Melanie really enjoyed being able to participate in the creation of the monsters herself. I remembered him asking me if he could make another one after the first one. It also helped calm her mind from the initial excitement and made her ready to focus. The thing I would do differently in a classroom is allow kids to actually play musical chairs as the monsters themselves. I would also like to play with the idea of ​​taking out more at once, to introduce skip counting.