The phrase to remember is “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally,” although the technical term is the mathematical “order of operations” (if you do a google). Order of Operations defines the “order” in which you do the calcs. The phrase above is a memory aid: P = Do items in Parathesis first (although I’m not sure the 6th grade has done this yet so the students can ignore this step). E = Do Exponents next (again, not sure if they’ve covered this yet). M & D = Then do all Multiplication and Division working left to right A & S = Then Addition and Subtraction working left to right So, in your example below: -24 / 4 x -2 would be, working left to right…(-24 / 4) which equals -6, then multiplied by -2, for an answer of 12. Regarding the negatives and multiplication, you listed all the right rules. The key is using PEMDAS to break the problem down into steps...all multiplication/division, before doing addition/subtraction. I suspect the left-to-right idea will help out a lot.