The purpose of this activity is for students to represent “are there enough?” story problems in a way that makes sense to them and to describe the relationships between the quantities in the problem. The contexts in this activity are intentionally designed to elicit matching strategies from students. Look for the ways students show that there are or are not enough. Listen for and highlight the ways students represent and describe how they see the bigger quantity, the smaller quantity, and the difference using informal language. In the Synthesis, students have opportunities to describe the relationship between the bigger and smaller quantity using both “1 more” and “1 fewer.”

• Reread the second problem.
• “Are there enough pencils for every student? How do you know?”
• Invite students to share their representations.
• “How many more pencils would we need to have enough? Explain how you know.” (We would need 1 more. I can see in my drawing that there’s 1 student who doesn’t have a pencil. I know 9 is 1 more than 8.)
• Highlight the use of 1 more or 1 fewer in student responses.
• “We need 1 more pencil for there to be enough. We could say there is 1 more student than pencils.”
• Display: “There is 1 fewer ______ than _____.”
• “How could we use ‘fewer’ to describe the pencils and students in the problem?”

The purpose of this activity is for students to practice using the words “more” and “fewer” to compare the quantities of objects. Students are familiar with describing numbers and quantities of objects using “1 more,” “1 less”, or “1 fewer” from kindergarten. This lesson intentionally encourages the use of “fewer” to prepare students to make sense of Compare, Difference Unknown story problems that ask, “How many fewer?” in upcoming lessons.

This activity helps revisit kindergarten concepts and build a common experience for all students to understand that “how many more?” and “how many fewer?” questions are both asking about the difference between a bigger quantity and a smaller quantity.

• Invite 2–3 groups to share an example of how they played.
• As each group shares, ask:
  • “How can we tell that the towers are not the same?”
  • “How did you decide if your partner’s tower showed more or fewer cubes?”
  • “How did you decide how many more or how many fewer?”