📝 Practice Worksheets
🛠️ Related Tools
🔑 Key Concepts
- When an expression has several integers, it can help to group all positive numbers together and all negative numbers together.
- Add the positive integers to find the positive total.
- Add the negative integers to find the negative total.
- Subtract the absolute values of the two totals.
- The final answer keeps the sign of the total with the larger absolute value.
✏️ Worked Examples — Group Positives and Negatives
🧠 Math Vocabulary
- Integer: A positive number, a negative number, or zero.
- Positive Integer: A number greater than zero.
- Negative Integer: A number less than zero.
- Absolute Value: The distance a number is from zero on a number line.
- Group: To place like terms or similar numbers together to make an expression easier to solve.
- Sum: The result of addition.
💡 Main Idea
When an expression contains several positive and negative integers, a helpful strategy is to group all the positives together and all the negatives together. After finding each total, compare their absolute values. Then subtract those absolute values and keep the sign of the group with the larger absolute value. This strategy helps students organize the problem and avoid sign mistakes.
📚 What You Should Already Know
You should already know how to add integers with the same sign, add integers with different signs, and find the absolute value of an integer.
🚀 What Comes Next
Next, students can apply this same grouping strategy to longer expressions, integer word problems, and multi-step expressions that involve parentheses and the order of operations.
🧩 Embed This Video in Your LMS
Teachers can embed this YouTube video directly into Canvas, Google Classroom, Schoology, or another learning platform. Click below to show the embed code.