Today Aiden and I worked on the concept of combining like terms. We started with an easy example of 3x+5x. I explained to Aiden that this is an expression, not an equation. So we aren’t actually solving for anything, just combining terms that are alike; x can represent anything. I tried to get Aiden to think, temporarily, as if he’s adding items. I asked, “if you have 3 x-rays and you add 5 x-rays, then how many x-rays will you have?” Aiden understood there would be 8 x-rays. Then we let the x equal a number. We started with 2, then tried 10. We showed that 3(2)+5(2)=8(2), and it would be true for any value of x. This was a good exercise for Aiden to see that the math will work regardless of x’s value.