The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) promotes creating resources that build procedural fluency from conceptual understanding through intentionally sequenced tasks that draw on students' prior knowledge and move from simple, concrete representations to more complex and abstract representations (Boston et al., 2017). Liljedahl (2020) and Wiemen et al. (2021) provide frameworks for designing such tasks, called Thin Slicing and Problem Strings, offering teachers an accessible entry point to create tasks that build from students' existing mathematical understandings. To illustrate how to integrate these design frameworks into instruction, the authors demonstrate a task sequence for adding and subtracting like terms--grounded in the concepts of equivalence and algebra as generalized arithmetic--that helps students see connections between concepts and procedures in algebra.