Subtraction word problem: tennis balls

- Mrs. Grange's second grade class has 45 tennis balls. Whenever I do a word problem like this I just like to write down the information that they're giving me. So we're gonna start with 45 tennis balls. They then tell us that 19 tennis balls, so she starts with 45 tennis balls to play with at recess. They then tell us that 19 tennis balls get thrown over the fence and 6 tennis balls just disappear. How many tennis balls does Mrs. Grange's class have left? So what I'd like to do, when I do these type of word problems, let's say, okay, first of all where am I starting from? Well, I'm starting from 45 tennis balls and then whats happening? Am I gaining tennis balls or am I losing tennis balls? Well I started with 45 or Mrs. Grange's class started with 45 then 19 tennis balls get thrown over the fence so they're losing the balls. And then another 6 tennis balls disappear, so both of these are losing tennis balls. And since I'm losing something, since I'm losing the tennis balls, or some of the tennis balls that I started with I should subtract here. Another clue that subtraction might be interesting is because it says how many tennis balls does Mrs. Grange's class have left, which implies that, well, she doesn't have all the tennis balls that she started with so we're probably going to subtract some balls. But it comes straight out of the word problem. 19 tennis balls get thrown over the fence, she loses them, so we should subtract that from the original amount. And then another 6 just disappear, so we should then subtract that on top of the 19, so let's do that. So let's first subtract the 19. So we start with 45 tennis balls, and then 19 balls get thrown over the fence, so 19 get thrown over the fence so we're subtracting them. They lose those balls, so what is this going to be? Well if we look in the ones place we have 5 ones minus 9 ones. Well, since 5 is less than 9 we want to do some regrouping. So let's go to the tens place. Instead of 4 tens, lets try that as 3 tens, and then take that 10 , turn it into ones so it's gonna be 10 ones. 10 ones plus 5 ones is 15. Now we're ready to subtract. 15 minus 9, well that's gonna be 6 because 9 plus 6 is 15. And then 3 tens minus 1 ten is going to be 2 tens, so 26. But are we done? No. This is just the number of balls we have left after the 19 get thrown over the fence but before we count the 6 that just disappeared. So we also have to take away 6 for the 6 balls that disappeared. So let's do that. So after 19, so we started with 45, 19 get thrown over the fence, we have 26 at that point. Then, 6 balls just disappear so we have, once again they disappear, they're not, you know, magically appearing. Since they're disappearing we subtract. So we, they're disappearing, so we want to subtract those. So how many do we have left? Well, 6 ones minus 6 ones is 0 ones. 2 tens minus, well nothing here, that's just going to be 2 tens. So how many do we have left? Well, or how many does Mrs. Grange's second grade class have left? Well you see it right here. They have 20 tennis balls, 20 tennis balls left. Started with 45, 19 get thrown over the fence so they lose them, that's why we subtracted. That gets us to 26, then 6 of them disappear so we take the 6 away from the 26 to get to 20.