Bead Chain Addition Snake
Your child lays a line of bead bars, counts off the first ten beads, swaps them for a single ten-bar, and keeps going until the snake is nothing but tens.
- Age
- 5 to 8, best at 6
- Setup
- 2 min
- Play
- 20 min or more
- Materials
- Household, or a bought set
- Mess
- None
- You
- Play along
Activity KG-A042
What you need
The whole thing is bars of beads in fixed lengths, one through nine, plus as many ten-bars as you can make. Beans threaded on a pipe cleaner do this as well as glass beads do.
- Bead bars, one to nine beadstwo or three of each Or: dried beans, buttons or short pasta tubes threaded the same way. The lengths are the point. A bar of six has to look like six and never need counting twice, so every bead on every bar is the same size, and nothing is threaded loosely enough to slide about.
- Ten-bars, in one colour of their ownx10 to 15 Or: ten beans in a paper strip folded over and taped shut. You run out of these before anything else. A snake of seven bars usually eats four or five of them, and stopping halfway to make more is where the count gets lost.
- Pipe cleaners, cut to lengthone per bar Or: 20 cm of strong thread knotted at both ends. Or a strip of masking tape with beans pressed onto the sticky side and folded over. Pipe cleaner is the one that survives a six year old. Twist each end into a small closed loop and the beads cannot come off. Thread bars burst mid-count and put forty beads on the floor.
- A small card arrow or a paper clipx1 It marks where the count reached. Ten counted beads have to stay marked while both hands go and fetch a ten-bar, and a finger cannot hold the place and carry at the same time.
- A tea towel or a tray on the tablex1 The snake stays in a line on cloth and slides apart on a bare table. It also means a half-finished snake can be carried out of the way at dinner time and come back the same shape.
How to set it up
- Set the ten-bars and the spare bars in a lid at the top of the table, outside the working space.30 sec
- Lay six or seven bars end to end in a wandering line, mixing long ones and short ones.40 sec
- Place the card arrow at the head of the snake, pointing at the first bead.10 sec
- Count aloud along the snake to ten, slide the arrow to the tenth bead, and let him do the swap.40 sec
What to say and what to do
Say
Count to ten, then stop.
Ten beads out, one bar in.
- Then count alongside him rather than at him. Say the numbers half a beat behind and drop out as soon as he stops needing you there.
Do
- Count the first ten aloud together, then let him count the second ten alone even if it comes out wrong. The correction belongs in the recount at the end, not in the middle of a count.
- Be the bank. He hands you ten beads' worth of bars, you hand back one ten-bar, and that exchange is the piece of this that does the teaching.
- Keep the leftovers. When a count runs past ten, the beads beyond the arrow come back as a short bar, and that short bar starts the next count.
Let be
- A count that lands on eleven. He finds it himself the second time he goes over that stretch, and finding it is worth more than being told.
- A snake that wanders round the tray instead of running straight. The line only has to be in one order, not in one direction.
- Fifteen minutes spent laying bars out in patterns before any counting starts. The bars have to become familiar objects before they can be quantities.
What it looks like when it is working
- He stops counting a bar of five bead by bead and just says five.
- The arrow gets moved without anyone mentioning it.
- He guesses how many ten-bars the snake will make before he counts it.
- The recount at the end happens because he wants to know, not because you asked.
What to expect at each age
At five
Counts every bead one at a time, including beads on a bar he has already counted. Needs the arrow moved for him, and the exchange done alongside him.
Knowing a bar by its length, without counting it, comes with a few weeks of handling them. At five the counting itself is the work.
Lasts 10 to 15 minutes
At six
Runs the snake alone from the second ten onwards, does the exchange, and keeps the remainder bar. Finishes a snake of seven bars in about twenty minutes.
Doing this on paper, or in his head, arrives later. The beads are what makes the answer checkable in the meantime.
Lasts 20 to 30 minutes
At seven and eight
Lays a long snake on purpose, twelve bars or more, and writes the numbers down beside it to see whether the paper and the beads agree.
This is where the beads turn into a way of checking written arithmetic rather than a way of doing it.
Lasts 30 minutes or more
When it goes sideways
Each of these is the snake telling you where the count is carrying too much, and each one is a small change to the materials.
She loses the count halfway along
The count is holding a number and a position at the same time, which is two jobs, and the position is the one that slips.
Give her the arrow to move herself, one bead per number as she counts. The number then only has to survive for one bead at a time.
We ran out of ten-bars
A seven-bar snake makes four or five tens, and most homemade sets start with three.
Make ten more before the next sitting, all in one colour used nowhere else. Ten-bars are the only piece here that cannot be improvised mid-game.
He counts the same bar twice
The counted end and the uncounted end of the snake look identical, so nothing is marking the boundary between them.
Move each finished ten-bar up to a second line above the snake as it is made. The gap between the two lines becomes the boundary, and it is visible from across the table.
It is finished in four minutes
The snake was short. Four bars is four bars, and at six a sitting lasts about as long as the snake is long.
Lay ten or twelve bars, and let him lay them. Choosing the snake is half of why a child comes back to this one.
Making it harder
Four rungs on the same set of bars. Nothing new gets threaded after the first evening; what changes is what the beads are being asked to prove.
Building the bars
- Ready when
- This is where everybody starts.
- What changes
- Threading bars of one to nine and laying them out as a staircase, shortest to longest.
- What is new
- Learning what each length looks like, which is what makes the counting possible later.
A short snake, four bars
- Ready when
- She can lay the staircase in order without checking each one.
- What changes
- Four bars end to end, counted off in tens with you doing the exchange.
- What is new
- Ten beads out and one bar in, which is the whole idea in its smallest form.
A long snake with a remainder
- Ready when
- He runs a short snake without help.
- What changes
- Eight or ten bars, and a snake that deliberately does not end on a round ten.
- What is new
- The remainder. What is left after the last full ten is the part that makes this feel like arithmetic rather than counting.
Snake, then paper
- Ready when
- She finishes a long snake and gets the same answer twice.
- What changes
- Write the bar numbers in a column beside the snake, add them on paper, then count the snake and compare.
- What is new
- The beads become the check on the written sum, which is the point where the material has done its job.
Stop at the end of a completed ten rather than in the middle of a count. A line of finished ten-bars with one short remainder on the end is worth calling him back to look at tomorrow.
How to keep it safe
Small parts, and that is the whole of it.
- Twist both ends of every pipe cleaner into a closed loop and press the loop flat. A bar that cannot shed beads is the difference between a table activity and a floor-sweeping one.
- Count the bars out at the start and back into the lid at the end. A set that is complete is also a room with nothing loose under the sofa.
- Keep the box on a high shelf if there is a child under three in the house. Single beads are exactly the size that goes in a mouth.
Why this helps
From the guide The claims here follow our guide on how patience actually develops.
Counting to a hundred is a rhyme. Counting ten beads out of a line, taking them away and putting one single object in their place is the moment a child stops reciting numbers and starts trading them. The exchange is physical: ten things leave the table, one thing arrives, and the quantity has not changed. That is the idea underneath every carried digit in written addition, and here it happens in the hands four or five times a snake.
The other thing the snake does is make a long sum survivable. Adding seven numbers on paper is a wall at six, because a slip anywhere ruins the lot and there is nothing to look at while you think. The snake keeps the whole sum lying on the table, a slip only costs the ten it happened in, and the answer sits there in a line waiting to be counted again.
Skill practised: counting in tens with a physical exchange
This is not a maths lesson with beads on it. A six year old runs the snake because handing over ten beads and getting one bar back is a good trade.
Where a set helps
Any bead does this, and a bag of dried beans on pipe cleaners does it tonight. What a printed set changes is what happens when the tray goes on the floor: the OtterDen Counting Rods are solid rods in fixed lengths, so a six is still a six on the carpet and there are no loose beads to find afterwards. The homemade bars teach exactly the same thing, and a child who threaded his own knows what is on each one.
One a week, at your child's age
We publish one new activity a week at each age, in exactly this format. The exchange in this one is far clearer in ten seconds of hands than in a paragraph about tens.
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Questions parents ask
How do I make the bars?
Cut pipe cleaners about 2 cm longer than the beads need, thread on one to nine beads, and twist each end into a closed loop. One evening makes two or three bars at every length plus a dozen ten-bars. Keep one colour for the ten-bars and use anything you like for the rest; what matters is that all the beads are the same size.
Does the colour coding matter?
It helps and it is not required. A fixed colour per length lets a child pick up the five without counting it, which speeds up laying the snake. With beans, write the number on a small paper tag and tape it to one end instead. The counting works identically.
My six year old gets a different answer every time.
That is usually the count restarting in the wrong place rather than the arithmetic going wrong. Move each finished ten-bar up to a second line as it is made, so the boundary between counted and uncounted is a visible gap rather than a memory. Two sittings of that and the answers settle.
Is this the same as learning number bonds?
It sits underneath them. A child running the snake meets six and four making ten, and seven and three making ten, dozens of times in a sitting, in his hands rather than on a flash card. The bonds get learnt later and much faster for it.