Subtract these bigger numbers using ungrouping, and then check your answer with an addition problem. I’ll do the first one for you!

Let’s Play: We’ll stack the numbers and draw freeway lanes, and look, the ones column is easy: 7 – 2 = 5. Great! In the tens column, we can’t do 0 – 9, so we’ll ungroup one hundred (changing 4 to 3) to get 10 tens (changing 0 to 10). Now we can subtract the tens column: 10 – 9 = 1.

In the hundreds column, we can’t do 3 – 6, right? So let’s ungroup 1 thousand (changing 9 to 8) to get 10 new hundreds (changing 3 to 13). Now we can subtract 13 – 6 = 7!

And there’s nothing to subtract in the thousands column, so we can just write the 8 down below. We’re left with 8 thousands, 7 hundreds, 1 ten, and 5 ones—in other words, 8715. Phew!

We’ve shown that 9407 – 692 = 8715, but now let’s check our work by putting the turkey sandwich back together—we’ll add 8715 + 692 and hope we get 9407. If we do, that means we did the subtraction right!

Yep, looks good!

Answer: 9407 – 692 = 8715

(Answers on page 149.)