Sally has HOW many jellybeans???

One thing I didn't know until I became an education major was there are different kinds of story problems!! I had no idea that teachers could write story problems in different ways to make them easier or more difficult for students to solve!  Who would have thought?? Now that I'm a teacher though, I wanted to see how my students responded to various story problems.  Let me show you what I'm talking about.  For this, I'll use examples from my Addition Scoot game (click HERE for the link) to show the different types of problems.

Easiest: Joint Result Unknown (JRU)
This is the most standard type of addition story problem.  You have both parts of the puzzle, and you just have to join them together, without knowing what the result is.

Medium Difficulty: Part-Part-Whole, Result Unknown (PPW)
This is partially down the spectrum.  You know what the two parts of the whole are, and are looking for the result.

More Difficult: Separate Start Unknown (SSU)
In these problems, the number at the start is not given.  We are given the second number, or the change, as well as the result.  Instinctively, we would think subtraction at first.  In order to solve this, addition is arguably a more efficient way to find the answer.

More Difficult: Compare-Quantity Unknown (CQU)
These questions involve thinking about who has what, and how those numbers compare to each other.  In the problem below, we know how many athletes China sent, and we know how many more than China the USA sent, but we do not know how many the USA sent.

There are other types of story problems, especially when you get into subtraction, multiplication and division.  These are the types of problems that use addition to help compute the answer.  If you have any questions, leave me a comment and I'll do my best to help clarify!

Thanks!