The purpose of this activity is for students to solve a story problem on their own and compare the different ways they represent and solve a problem with their classmates. Students revisit and make sense of ways to represent a story problem with drawings and expressions and relate their representations to the meaning of addition. The activity also allows teachers to observe the strategies students use to find the total.

Monitor for and select students with the following approaches to share in the Synthesis:

• Represent the story with counters and count all.
• Represent the story with drawings and count all or count on from 6.
• Represent the story with and count on from 6.

The approaches are sequenced from more concrete to more abstract in order to invite all students to make sense of ways to represent addition. Aim to elicit both key mathematical ideas and a variety of student voices, especially students who haven’t shared recently.

• Invite previously selected students to share in the given order. Record or display their work for all to see.
• Connect students’ approaches by asking:
  • “How are these ways of representing the story the same? How are they different?”
• If no students use expressions to represent the story, say: “Yesterday we looked at using expressions like or to represent stories. What expression would we write to represent this story?”
• Connect students’ approaches to the learning goal by asking:
  • “How do each of these representations match the story?”
  • “Explain to your partner how you know this story matches addition.”

The purpose of this activity is for students to represent Add To and Take From, Result Unknown stories and compare the different ways they count to solve the problems. Students should continue to make sense of and represent each story problem in a way that makes sense to them (MP1).

In addition to the different ways students represent the problem, monitor for the different ways students count to find the answer. Students may count out each part of the problem, and then count again to find the answer. Others may begin to count on or count back. Although some students may use known facts or other mental strategies, choose counting strategies that match the actions in the story to share in the Synthesis. Students will continue to progress toward more advanced counting and computation strategies throughout the unit. The most important thing is for students to make sense of different strategies and relate the strategies to the different parts of the story (MP2).

• Invite previously identified students to share how they represented and solved each problem.
• Annotate student counting by labeling objects or drawings or listing the numbers they say when the count (9, 8, 7). Draw a box around the number that represents the answer.
• “How are these strategies for finding the answer the same? How are they different?”
• “How do these strategies match what happened in the story?”