When teachers listen to, and learn from, students, they begin to see the world from a child's perspective, and this helps make what they teach more accessible to students. Thus it is important for teachers and educators to understand mathematics from the children's perspectives to help them improve their classroom instructions, by anticipating difficulties children may face when learning mathematics. Clement (2004) described five representations in mathematics: relevant situations, pictures, manipulatives, spoken language, written symbols, and how understanding the connections among these representations is useful for making sense of children' responses to tasks. In this article, the authors identify some symbolic representations used by elementary school teachers to record distributions during multi-digit subtraction and addition, and discuss how these symbols can pose learning difficulties from a child's perspective. They then suggest how children can be guided in understanding the addition and subtraction algorithms having recognised these difficulties. (Contains 4 figures.)