What on earth is a number sentence?

I am often asked questions about weird and wonderful maths vocabulary which children and their teachers use. This one is the most common of all.

What on earth is a number sentence?

A number sentence is simply a way of expressing what we are doing with our numbers.

I could say, “I have five apples and my friend gives me three more – so now I have eight.” That would be a number sentence.

I could say, “Five add three is the same as eight.” This is also a number sentence.

But the shortest way of saying it is using all the signs and symbols that we know, to represent what we are doing.

5+3=8

This is a number sentence that we mean when we talk about them at school.

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