Word Problems: Addition

Addition, in sentences

Every question is a small scenario: someone has a number of something and gets more, and the child works out how many there are now.

The numbers change with difficulty. Easy stays under twenty on each side, medium runs into the sixties, hard goes to a hundred and fifty — which is where carrying becomes unavoidable.

Why this is harder than a column of sums

A page of vertical additions asks one thing: can you add. A word problem asks three. Can you read it, can you work out that it is an addition, and can you add.

Children who are fluent on the first are regularly stuck on the second, and it goes unnoticed for a long time because the arithmetic sheets keep coming back correct. This is the sheet that finds it.

Three difficulty bands

The bands change the size of the numbers and leave the sentence alone.

That is deliberate. A child struggling here is nearly always struggling with the reading and the choosing rather than the adding, so dropping the numbers while keeping the wording intact isolates one difficulty at a time and tells you which of the two is actually the problem. Move up once the sentences are being decoded reliably.

Reading is the obstacle

Very few children get these wrong because they cannot add.

They get them wrong after scanning for two numbers and guessing at an operation, which works often enough to become a habit. The fix is a routine: read the whole thing once with the pencil down, say aloud what is happening, work out what is being asked, and only then go looking for numbers.

Underlining the question sentence helps far more than underlining the numbers — which is what most children do unprompted, and which trains them to skip the part that decides the answer.

Keywords are a trap

"Altogether means add" carries a child through a page of matched examples and collapses the first time a question is worded sideways.

Ask what is physically happening instead. Combined, removed, repeated in equal groups, or shared out? Four questions, and they hold up against any phrasing an exam paper can produce.

Practicalities

Twelve problems and an answer key by default. Names and objects are drawn from a pool, so two sheets on identical settings are not identical sheets, which is useful for a retake and for the child sitting next door.

Print several at once for a week's set.

Companion sheets: subtraction, multiplication and division. For bare sums, the addition worksheet generator.