Does 2+4 = 4+2?

Today we were talking about the many different addends for a certain sum. On the whiteboard I put up ____ + ____ = 6 and I had the students come up with different possibilities.

I think their answers were along the lines of
3,3
4,2
5,1
6,0
2,4

I looked at the last one and I thought to myself, are 4 and 2, the same as 2 and 4?

So I posed this problem to the class: Suppose we are looking at our own class were our equation is ___ + ___ = 8. What are the two addends for our own class?

Again I got answers like:
4,4
5,3
3,5
7,1
8,0

My thought was 3 and 5 since we have three second graders and five second graders. But when I started asking the students about why they thought of those number combinations, I was impressed.

The boy who said 4,4 was thinking of 4 boys and 4 girls. Someone else said the combination was 8,0 because we were all Grade 1-2 students.

I was hoping someone would talk about our nationalities, but maybe it is better that did not happen. Nationality can be a sensitive topic.

After asking some more questions, we found out that we have four 7-year-olds and four 6-year-olds.

I wish we had more time today. We should look more into these sums.