1d. Apply properties of operations as strategies to add and subtract rational numbers.

Thankfully, your students won't have to learn any new addition or subtraction properties when they're dealing with rational numbers. All the old tricks, like the associative and commutative properties, still totally apply. Thank goodness.

When they're adding something like , make sure your students know that they can tackle these guys in any order they want (as long as they watch those plus and minus signs). They'd probably want to blast through the two fractions first, so they can rearrange the problem as without changing the answer at all.

Of course, students will actually have to complete the calculation and find the answer. The goal, though, is to show them that no matter how gnarly each term is, they can save a bunch of time and headache by rearranging everything into the easiest possible order. We're all about efficient laziness over here.