A school garden has 28 carrots in one bed and 37 carrots in another bed. Students plant 16 more carrots. How many carrots are there now?
Reasoning strategy
Add the two beds, then add the new carrots.
Difficulty Practice Guide
Medium Grade 2 Addition Word Problems
This page shows what medium practice should demand for grade 2 addition word problems. The goal is not a larger worksheet. The goal is to make the student's reasoning visible enough to choose the next better problem.
What Changes At This Difficulty
Add one meaningful reasoning layer so students must plan before calculating.
Expected structure: 2-3 step problem solving.
Vocabulary load: low with minimal distractors.
Reasoning depth: at least 2 relationship layers.
Student Work Signals
A good medium problem should expose the bottleneck
MathRoutine watches for whether the student understood the situation, wrote a useful setup, handled the calculation, and answered the exact question asked.
1
separate useful numbers from background details
2
complete a two-step setup
3
interpret the result with the correct unit
Sample Problems
A book fair sold 45 books before lunch and 38 books after lunch. How many books were sold that day?
Reasoning strategy
Add two two-digit quantities with regrouping.
Why This Matters
The paid value is diagnosis, not answer lookup
Basic gives repeated targeted practice. Pro becomes useful when the student needs help understanding wording, recovering the setup, or seeing the same misconception return across attempts.
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