Explanation:
1. <em>Pay attention</em> to your experience in the real world, especially when counting or shopping. Math is invented to facilitate descriptions of real-world phenomena. (When new relationships are discovered, new math must be invented to describe them.) The first use of it involved accounting for goods owned, bought, sold, or divided among group members. Most household use of math is still for these purposes, but also includes measurements, ratios, and proportions such as used in cooking or building.
2. Understand the meaning of math symbols and their translation from English. (That's a vocabulary issue, which is why you spend so much time to <em>learn names of things in math</em>.) Pay attention to what happens when you add, subtract, increase, decrease quantities of different sizes. Playing counting games (especially, jacks, or games requiring you count to high numbers), keeping numerical scores, dealing or distributing cards or other objects, arranging objects in groups--all these can give you better "number sense" and help reinforce arithmetic skills.
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The linear equations you're asked to write generally are of a couple of different kinds.
One of these is the kind of relationship you might see when considering a rental or repair: there is some fixed charge, and there are additional charges based on parts and/or hours. (cost = fixed amount + (hours × hourly charge), for example) A purchase is the same sort of relationship: at my grocery, there is a fixed bag charge, and then the price of each good is multiplied by the number of them I buy. The total cost is the total of those, assuming all items are non-taxable.
Another is a "trade-off" equation. You see this sort of thing where resources are fixed, or a given number of items is allocated to two or more uses. A familiar example is the number of games played in a season is a constant, and is distributed among wins, losses, ties, and unplayed: (W +L +T+ U = constant).
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In early grades, when you're learning arithmetic facts, you solve problems like ...
1 + __ = 2
3 × __ = 6
In Algebra, we give the blank (unknown value) a name. Often that name is "x", but it can be anything you like. An algebraic formulation of the same problems would look like these linear equations ...
1 + x = 2
3x = 6
So, the first thing you can do is recognize that you have already been seeing linear equations for many years. (This is why you learn vocabulary--so you understand that familiar forms and ideas are now being described in a more formal language.)
