Second grade students understanding of the arithmetic operations

People face Mathematics at a very early stage in their lives since it is a part of various everyday activities. M. Jurkovič (2009) came to a conclusion in her research that Mathematics in the first grades of elementary schools is one of the most popular subjects, despite of the fact that a lot of pupils have difficulties with it. In my diploma I tried to asses how the pupils who have difficulties with Mathematics understand arithmetic operations of adding and subtracting, which calculating strategies do they use and why do they make mistakes. I was interested in to which extent do didactic games, which are included into Mathematics lessons by teachers, contribute to school report improvement. Lessons for the experimental group, which consisted of 6 students with learning disabilities at Mathematics, consisted of didactic games during the whole school year which made practicing arithmetic more amusing. The pupils' strategies were tested at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the school year and it was established that their strategies were changing. In the empiric part we present the test results of the experimental group compared to the control group during the school year and at the end of the school year. In the research conclusion it was established that the pupils which used didactic games and various representations showed better results than the students who did not learn with the help of didactic games but only with the help of classic methods of teaching arithmetic