This page will help you explore how most people first learned how to add. You probably first learned to add by "one-to-one correspondence" of your fingers to the number you needed to add, like 3 + 1. First you put out three fingers, then 1 more. Then you re-counted what you had.

You see, children don't automatically see four fingers and recognize that as the number "four." First they learn to count on their fingers. If you ask a young child who is first learning about numbers to show you the number four, s/he will invariably count, "one, two, three, four," and put out one finger at a time as they count. Then they have reached four. That is counting, using "one-to-one correspondence."

After a child does that often enough, they come to recognize that four fingers represents the number four, and don't have to count the fingers individually anymore. Most people don't realize that, at that moment, they have made one of their first mathematical leaps.

That was good enough for us, until we got to a sum which was more than the fingers of one hand.

The illustration below shows us how most people first did addition on their fingers.

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OK, I'm great at this now, take me to the next lesson!

It should take about 30 lessons, all about as "demanding" as this one, for you to reach an amazing level of skill with mental addition.

Before you go on to the next lesson, you can test your simple addition skills by clicking the link in the box below.