How Does Regrouping Work in Math?

Regrouping is like when you trade your toys for bigger or smaller ones so it’s easier to count everything.

Imagine you have 15 marbles. That's 1 ten and 5 ones. Now, if you want to add 7 more marbles, you can’t just put them all in the ones place, that would be 12 ones, which is too many! So you trade 10 of those ones for 1 ten. Now you have 2 tens and 2 ones, which makes 22 marbles.

• You start with ones
• When you have 10 ones, you can trade them for 1 ten
• This is called regrouping, it helps you keep track of bigger numbers

If you have 25 tens (which is like having 25 groups of 10), that’s the same as 2 hundreds and 5 tens. You can trade 10 tens for 1 hundred, just like trading 10 ones for 1 ten.

Regrouping helps you move from smaller units to bigger ones, making it easier to add or subtract big numbers, just like trading marbles when your pile gets too big!