Problem-solving strategies are important parts of our middle school curriculum. Teaching strategies is an excellent way to help students attack mathematical, as well as other, problems. Such strategies include guessing and checking, simplifying the problem, building a model, developing a systematic list or a chart, working backward, drawing a picture, and looking for a pattern. Our students spend an entire school year in the eighth grade to learn to use these problem- solving strategies to solve problems that would otherwise require sophisticated mathematical tools if they could be solved at all by mathematical methods. This experience promotes the development of intuition and number sense in young students.