Counters help to make arithmetic operations easier to understand.
Before you start modelling, it is important to interpret the expression.
We have:
10 - (-6)
This means 10 takes away negative 6.
We can also write this as:
10 + 6
This would mean adding 6 to 10.
Therefore, the first step would be to model the first number 10.
That is the first step.