Lesson 11

Combining Like Terms (Part 3)

In this lesson, students have an opportunity to demonstrate fluency in combining like terms and look for and make use of structure (MP7) to apply the distributive property in more sophisticated ways.

Explain (orally and in writing) how to write an equivalent expression with fewer terms.
Generalize (orally) about what strategies are useful and what mistakes are common when writing equivalent expressions with fewer terms.
Identify equivalent expressions, and justify (orally and in writing) that they are equivalent.

Let’s see how we can combine terms in an expression to write it with less terms.

Given an expression, I can use various strategies to write an equivalent expression.
When I look at an expression, I can notice if some parts have common factors and make the expression shorter by combining those parts.

Building On