Grammar helps us communicate the meaning of a sentence.

Consider the punctuation in the following two sentences:

“Naveed,” said the teacher, “is very responsible.”

Naveed said the teacher is very responsible.

These sentences have two totally different meanings!

In math, our sentences consist of numbers and operations.

We need rules to clarify what we are being asked to calculate.

• Review the order of operations.
• Explore when brackets are needed and when they can be removed in an expression.
• Perform calculations involving integers, fractions, and decimals using the order of operations.
• Use the distributive property to simplify calculations.

We introduce symbols to save time and space, and to add precision.

\(3+5=8\)

'The sum of three and five equals 8.'