Does your teacher send a count of the number of lunches your class orders to the cooks in the cafeteria?

We add and subtract everyday!
The lunch count is a way to use addition and subtraction in real life to be sure every child has a lunch for the day!

       Lunch Count

     __1__Buy milk only (brought lunch)

 + __6__ Nothing needed (brought everything)
_________________________

    ____ Total

What if the cooks wanted to know how many students were buying lunch in all.  What would we do?

The words "in all" tell us to add.

We would add:

14 children are buying lunch.
 

How many more children are buying lunch than bringing lunch?

Now what do we do to find this answer?

The words "How many more" tells us that we need to subtract.  We subtract the smaller number from the larger number.

We already know that 14 children are buying lunch.

Now we need to know how many children brought their lunch so we can subtract.

SO      

__1__Buy milk only (brought lunch)

__6__ Nothing needed (brought everything)

1 + 6 = 7

The answer is 7 more children are buying lunch than bringing lunch.