Math Worksheets

Posts Tagged ‘doing subtraction’

Subtraction worksheets can help you practice subtraction. Most people find subtraction harder than Addition so subtraction worksheets come in handy. There are also subtraction games to play to help you practice subtraction as well as subtraction lesson plans and free subtraction worksheets. After you have mastered normal subtraction, you can practice binary subtraction or subtraction of any other bases. We have printable math subtraction games and free subtraction worksheets to help you.

Before diving into subtraction worksheets and solving subtraction problems, let’s discuss how subtraction works and which easy ways there are to do subtraction.

Most people start counting using their fingers.

So, if you start with 10 (10 fingers) and take away 3, you will end up with 7. It is easy to see. So, the difficulty comes in when you need to subtract a number that is larger than 10. Let’s start with illustrating subtraction of number 9 from 36.

When doing subtraction, let’s write the numbers in columns in the order given. In this case, we are subtracting 9 from 36 so we write 36 at the top. If we are subtracting 36 from 9 then we would write 9 at the top and our solution to the subtraction problem will be a negative number. But, that is not our example here. Here we subtract 9 from 36 giving:

Now, as with doing Addition, let’s work on the right hand column first then work your way to the left hand column. In the right hand column, we have 6 minus 9. That’s a problem. 6 is less than 9. So, we are going to borrow one from the column immediately left to the column you are working on. In this case, we are going to borrow 1 from 3 in the left hand column.

Borrowing 1 from 3 leaves 2 in the left hand column and gives the right hand column an additional 10. So, in the right hand column, we have 16 minus 9 giving 7. We are now done with the right hand column. On the left hand column there is only one number which is 2. So, we are done with our subtraction of 36 and 9 and we have 27 as the solution of this subtraction problem. You can use this same method of subtraction to subtract larger numbers.