Shopping Math: Four Cards, Four Different Questions

No two cards ask the same thing here. The shelf on this 2nd grade money worksheet holds five vehicles with tags reading 40¢, 15¢, 45¢, 30¢ and 10¢, and the four cards below run through the whole repertoire: Mia buys three of them and pays how much, Max buys one and pays with two coins drawn as circles marked 25 so the change has to be found, Lily has 55¢ and the child circles yes or no then writes the total, and the last card asks how much more one vehicle costs than another. Each card has a dot grid to work on and a dashed answer box with ¢ beside it.

Mixing the four types is a harder job than any one of them, because the child can no longer run the same procedure down the page. Deciding whether a story wants adding, taking away or comparing is the part of word problems that transfers, and it only gets practiced when the question changes from card to card. The order is deliberate too: the total comes first as the most familiar, and the how much more card comes last, since difference is the type most often answered by adding out of habit.

Print the PDF free and ask the child to say what each card is asking before any numbers are written, in their own words. If one type collapses, the single-type pages are the place to repair it: add up the basket for totals, how much change for coins and change, is there enough money for the yes-or-no compare, and how much more for differences. Come back to this page afterwards, since telling the four apart is what it is for. The multiplication and division word problems page carries the same reading habit into third grade.