ABSTRACT
In many classrooms a single word problem might be the focus of a mathematics lesson. Students work together to interpret the meaning of the problem and share a variety of strategies for solving it. A second-grade teacher knows that students often find story problems more challenging when the first number in a problem is missing. The teacher gives each set of partners a copy of the game board and tells them to write FREE in one of the spaces and randomly fill in the numbers 1–15 in the other spaces. The teacher decides to play again as a whole class tomorrow and then, when the fifth-grade reading buddies arrive tomorrow afternoon, she will have them support play in small groups with partners working together to solve the problems. Visual number bonds, shown horizontally or vertically, can be used to summarize the addition and subtraction relationships among two addends and their sum.
