Singapore Math Drills Team · 11 June 2026
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If there's one thing that makes parents nervous about Singapore Math, it's the word problems. Your child can add and multiply perfectly well on their own, but give them a paragraph about Ali, Siti and a basket of stickers and suddenly everyone is stuck — including you.
The bar model is the tool that unlocks them. It's the single most powerful heuristic in the Singapore curriculum, introduced from Primary 3 and used right through the PSLE. Once you understand it yourself, you can guide your child through almost any word problem without needing to remember the algebra you learned years ago. Here's how it works.
A bar model is a simple picture: rectangles (bars) that stand in for quantities. Instead of juggling numbers in their head, your child draws the problem. This is the "Pictorial" stage of Singapore's Concrete–Pictorial–Abstract (CPA) approach — the bridge between handling real objects and writing abstract equations.
There are two core types:
Ninety percent of primary word problems are one of these two. The skill isn't arithmetic — it's recognising which model fits, then reading the answer off the picture.
Here's the kind of comparison problem your child will meet — try it yourself before revealing the answer:
Ali has 3 times as many stickers as Siti. Together they have 48 stickers. How many stickers does Ali have?
Hint: Draw Siti as 1 unit and Ali as 3 units — that's 4 units for 48 stickers.
Here's how to walk your child through it.
Step 1 — Draw the smaller quantity as one unit. Siti has the fewer stickers, so draw one bar to represent her share. Call it 1 unit.
Step 2 — Draw the comparison. Ali has 3 times as many, so his bar is three identical units long. Together that's 4 equal units making up the total of 48:
Step 3 — Count the total units.
Together they have 1 + 3 = 4 units, and those 4 units represent all 48 stickers.
Step 4 — Find the value of one unit.
48 ÷ 4 = 12. So 1 unit = 12 stickers.
Step 5 — Answer the actual question.
3 × 12 = 36 stickers.Check: 12 + 36 = 48 ✓ and 36 is indeed 3 × 12 ✓.
Notice what just happened: a problem that looks like it needs algebra (x + 3x = 48) became a picture a nine-year-old can reason through. That's the whole point of the bar model — it makes the hidden structure visible.
Comparison problems often come with a known total. Here is a common pattern:
A bookshop sold 240 books on Saturday and Sunday. It sold 56 more books on Sunday than on Saturday. How many books did it sell on Saturday?
Draw two bars stacked to show the whole, 240. The Sunday bar is longer than the Saturday bar by 56.
If you "chop off" the extra 56, the two bars become equal:
240 − 56 = 184. That's two equal Saturday-sized parts, so one part is 184 ÷ 2 = 92.
92 + 56 = 148.Check: 92 + 148 = 240 ✓. This "remove the difference, then split equally" move is one your child will use again and again — and the bar makes it obvious.
The mistake most parents make is solving the problem for the child. Instead, ask questions that nudge them to the next step:
Your child does the drawing and the reasoning; you just keep the questions coming. Over a few weeks, they'll start asking these questions themselves — which is exactly when word problems stop being scary.
Bar models only become second nature with repetition across many problem types — part–whole, comparison, before-and-after, fractions of a quantity. That variety is hard to assemble from a single worksheet.
Singapore Math Drills builds the bar model and CPA method directly into practice: word problems are presented the way the MOE syllabus teaches them, so your child meets the right model at the right level, from the P3 introduction up to PSLE-style multi-step questions.
And because drawing is central to the method, every practice screen includes a built-in scratch pad — a full-screen digital canvas where your child can sketch their bars by hand, with colours, line widths, and ruled lines, right inside the app. No scrambling for scrap paper, and crucially, their working is visible instead of hidden behind a typed answer. When a question goes wrong, you (and they) can see exactly where the model broke down.
That combination — the method taught correctly, plus a place to draw it — is how the bar model goes from "a thing on the worksheet" to a tool your child reaches for automatically.
Give your child a place to practise bar models properly — start today, no credit card required.