# Doodles Do Algebra – Lesson 38

Update: This Lesson Is Part of Book 3 of Doodles Do Algebra: “The Basic Math of Algebra” available on Amazon.

Worksheet:

Available in the book, “The Basic Math of Algebra, Book 3 of Doodles Do Algebra“

Today your child continues practicing algebraic addition. It should start to be getting easier for her at this point.
I refer to a concept my kids and I call hippo hopping. We developed the term back when my daughter hated math. I tried to make every day’s math into a cartoon and a fun activity. She was learning the distributive property and I needed an outrageous name that would interest her – and so hippo hopping was born. The way it works is the hippo stands on top of the number that will do the hopping, in this case the 3, grabs it in its jaws and hops (using its immense belly as a hippityhop bouncing ball) first to the a (the first term). When the hippo lands on the a, the 3 replicates and multiplies the a to make 3a. Then, job done, the hippo bounces back to its starting point on top of the 3, picks up the 3 in its jaws and hops over to the b, multiplying the two together and getting 3b. So once the hippo is finished 3(a+b) becomes 3a +3b. Now hippo hopping may not suit you and your family, so if it is not something that excites the imagination of your child – or if you dread the day your son gets into his first engineering course in college and tells his professor that he solved the equation using hippo hopping, then just ignore all future references to hippo hopping.

Problem 1. $4a -2b -7c$
Problem 2. $a + b + c + d + e + f$
Problem 3. $8a + 8b$