In Say It With Symbols, students learn to use symbolic expressions to represent and reason about relationships. Students also manipulate symbolic expressions into equivalent forms to access new information. The emphasis is on using the properties of numbers and properties of equality to look at equivalent expressions and the information each expression represents.

In addition,students interpret underlying patterns that a symbolic equation or statement represents. Students look critically at each part of an expression and how each part relates to the original expression, its graph, its table, and the context that is modeled.