The purpose of this lesson is to remind students how tape diagrams and equations can be used to represent operations. There are two roles that tape diagrams (or any diagrams) can play: helping to visualize a relationship and helping to solve a problem. The focus of this lesson is using tape diagrams to represent relationships between values in equations. Students both interpret tape diagrams and create their own. This prepares students to use both diagrams and equations to solve problems in later lessons.

Note that the terms “solution” and “variable” aren’t defined until the next lesson, nor should any solution methods be generalized yet. Students should engage with the activities and reason about quantities in ways that make sense to them.