Emphasize student understanding and reasoning! This lesson plan helps learners solve story problems using sense-making strategies. This can be used alongside the lesson Solving Word Problems or as a stand-alone lesson.

Use this lesson to teach your students how to determine if they should use addition, subtraction, or both operations to solve a word problem by following four simple steps.

Get your students synthesizing various subtraction strategies as they work with a partner to solve word problems. This lesson can be used alone or with the lesson plan Show Me the Money! Two-Digit Subtraction.

Word problems can be overwhelming to students, but if they have a tool to help them, they can handle it! Use this as a stand alone lesson or alongside Stepping Through Addition and Subtraction Word Problems.