Our current standards do not support (or mention) the use of keywords to determine operations. If you read the model curriculums starting in kindergarten and pay particular attention to the standards focused on making sense of the operations, you see that all suggestions are completely the opposite.  The standards are all about deep meaning and true sense-making.  Instead, we want scholars to determine the operations of story situations based on the action happening in the problem and also utilize a true understanding of what it means to add, subtract, multiply, or divide. 

If you look at the CUBES problem-solving model, reading the problem is not even one of the steps! If we think, well, of course, scholars know to read the problem (watch this model in action)! More often than not scholars just literally start circling numbers (and not even the labels that go with the numbers…) without ever having read the problem.