Teach Your Students to Use Part-Part Whole to Solve Number Facts!

Help your students solve addition and subtraction number facts using the part-part-whole strategy. This fundamental concept in mathematics helps students understand how things are made up of smaller parts and how those parts relate to the whole. It helps students visualize the relationship between the numbers in a fact family.

This colorful and engaging digital resource will teach students the component parts of a whole number and uses easy-to-read visual models to demonstrate how the parts fit together.

This 18-slide deck:

• Introduces the concept of a strip or tape model.
• Gives examples of the parts and whole in a number sentence.
• Asks students to “fill in” missing numbers and create their own strip or tape models to represent the number facts.

Display this Interactive Activity on your smartboard in Presenter View. Through this activity, students will show that they can arrange and rearrange parts of a number sentence to create a working visual tape model representing the relevant fact. 

Tips for Differentiation + Scaffolding 

A team of dedicated, experienced educators created this resource to support your Math lessons. 

In addition to individual student work time, use this activity to enhance learning through Math centers, whole class lessons, or remote learning assignments. 

If you have a mixture of above and below-level learners, we have a few suggestions for keeping students on track with these concepts: 

🆘 Support Struggling Students

Provide students with a printout of the instructional slides so they can physically cover up parts of the number sentence to familiarize them with the idea that the “missing” numbers remain the same.  

➕ Challenge Fast Finishers

Extend your higher-ability learners by challenging them to create a tape model and number fact for 2-digit addition and subtraction numbers!

🧑‍🏫 Group Learning

Project the slides onto a screen and work through them as a class by having students record their answers in their notebooks or mini whiteboards. 

Easily Prepare This Part-Part-Whole Presentation

Use the dropdown icon on the Download button to save the Google Slides version of this resource.

Assign this interactive activity to Google Classroom. Please be sure to open in Edit mode, not Presentation mode. Students click to reveal the answers.

Alternatively, print slides to use for your: 

• Maths rotations
• Maths warm-ups
• End of the day wrap-ups
• Fast finisher activities 
• Homework assignments

This resource was created by Kendall Britnell, a teacher from Colorado and Teach Starter Collaborator.

Looking for more engaging and fun teacher-created activities made by our team of teachers? Take a look at these!

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