Lesson 7

The purpose of this lesson is for students to solve Put Together/Take Apart, Both Addends Unknown story problems.

In the previous lesson, students represented a questionless Put Together/Take Apart, Both Addends Unknown story problem. In this lesson, students notice and discuss that Put Together/Take Apart, Both Addends Unknown story problems have more than 1 solution. In the second activity, students discuss how labels show the solution to the story problem.

In a previous section, students used expressions to represent compositions and decompositions of numbers. Beginning in the second activity and throughout the rest of the section, students write an expression to record the solution or solutions they find for the story problem.

Throughout this section, the teacher records student responses with equations. Equations are read aloud to students as “10 is 5 plus 5.” Students will be asked to interpret and work with equations in the next section.

• Gather materials from: 
  • What’s Behind My Back, Stage 1
  • 5-frames, Stages 1 and 2
  • Make or Break Apart Numbers, Stage 1

Reflect on who participated in math class today. What assumptions are you making about those who did not participate? How can you leverage each of your students’ ideas to support them in being seen and heard in tomorrow’s math class?