The curriculum for eleven-year old students in the United Kingdom, currently adopted by most schools, includes solving linear equations with the unknown on one side only before moving onto those with the unknown on both sides in later years. School textbooks struggle with the balance between developing algebraic understanding and training algebraic skills. In this article the authors describe an attempt to encourage students to exploit an already familiar image, the number line, in order to address mathematical difficulties with solving linear equations. What should also be stressed, however, is that the authors do not consider this to be a new method for solving equations, nor a new form of representation. It is simply the exploitation of an image with which the students are already comfortable, to support their developing understandings of linear equations through access to the solution strategies available. This is a crucial distinction and will be referred to a number of times during the course of the article.