3 Digit Addition Worksheets: Carry Step by Step
3 digit addition worksheets: 288 column sums in six stages, no carrying through to carrying twice, with carry boxes and answers. Free PDF.
- Pages
- 27
- Ages
- 7-10
- Paper size
- A4 and US Letter
- Black ink only
Same worksheets, two paper sizes. Free to print at home, at school, and in a classroom of thirty.
288 column sums under H, T and O in six stages, carry boxes, answers
These 3 digit addition worksheets go up in six stages, and the stage that matters is the last one. Carrying out of the ones is a trick a child learns once. Carrying out of the tens when the tens have already been given a carry is the part that goes wrong, because the ten being carried was not there when they looked at the column.
What is in the 27 pages
- Sheets 1-4: 3 digit + 1 digit, nothing to carry (992 + 3).
- Sheets 5-8: 3 digit + 2 digit, nothing to carry (544 + 54).
- Sheets 9-12: 3 digit + 3 digit, nothing to carry (325 + 113).
- Sheets 13-16: carrying out of the ones only (127 + 63).
- Sheets 17-20: carrying out of the ones, both numbers three digits (118 + 256).
- Sheets 21-24: carrying twice, out of the ones and out of the tens (259 + 575).
- Last two pages: every answer, sheet by sheet.
Twelve sums a sheet, 288 in all, and no sum appears twice in the book. Every answer stays under 1000, so a fourth column never appears and the page a child is on always looks like the page before.
Twelve sheets before anything carries
Half the book carries nothing at all. That looks like padding and it is the opposite. Column addition has two separate lessons in it, lining the digits up by place and exchanging ten for one, and a child who meets both on the same sheet learns neither. The first twelve sheets drill the lining up until it is automatic, and only then does the carry arrive on a layout the child already recognises.
Why the shorter number has no leading zero
On sheet 5 a sum reads 544 + 54, with the 54 sitting under the tens and the ones and nothing under the hundreds. We do not write it as 054. Padding it with a zero turns the sum into something a child can do without thinking about place at all, which is the one thing these sheets exist to teach. If the gap under the hundreds is causing trouble, that is the lesson landing, not a mistake. The tens and ones worksheets are where to go back to.
The small boxes, and when they appear
From sheet 13 a dashed box sits above the tens and the hundreds. 7 + 6 makes 13: the 3 goes in the ones answer box and the 1 goes in the small box above the tens, to be added with the tens. Sheets 1-12 do not show the boxes at all, because a child should never be looking at a space they have no use for yet.
On the last four sheets both boxes get used in the same sum. 259 + 575 carries a ten out of the ones, and then 5 + 7 plus that carried ten makes 13 tens, which carries a hundred as well. Children who are fine until sheet 21 and then stall have almost always forgotten to add the carried ten, not forgotten how to add.
Class 3, grade 2 or year 3
In most Indian schools three-digit addition is class 3 work, with carrying introduced partway through the year. In US schools it is grade 2 into grade 3, and in England year 3. The sheets are numbered rather than labelled by class so you can start wherever the child actually is: if 2 digit sums still need counting on fingers, 2 digit addition worksheets come first.
For the take-away version of exactly these stages, see 3 digit subtraction worksheets.
Printing this one correctly
In your printer dialog set Scale to 100% or Actual size, not Fit to page. Fit to page shrinks the tracing letters and they stop matching the size a child's hand is learning.
Plain paper is fine for crayons and pencils. If your child uses felt pens, 100 gsm paper stops the ink bleeding to the next sheet.
