The Art of Mastering Word Problems
Abigail Lund
Created on May 31, 2023
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Transcript
4
Questions
2
1
3
5
Inferencing
Author'sPurpose
InteroggotiveSentences
Student Examples
Lastly, after I give my students the information they need to solve, students make an inferences based on the information given and their previous background knowledge on how they are going to use all this information to solve this problem. With that I give them the numbers necessary to solve and they prove their thinking with their evidence. This is how I begin teaching reading in math.
Here are some examples of numberless problems I have used in my class: Template for Numberless Word Problem
“What is the interrogative sentence?” Perhaps the beginning of teaching word problems is asking our kids what is a word problem made of. After looking at many examples we will see all of them have at least 1 interrogative sentences. Why is this important? Because if our students can identify the problem they are closer to the solution... I began by telling my students that to interrogate is to ask questions and when we are mathematicians and scientists we are constantly trying to find answers to questions. We have to be able to find the questions and know what is being asked to answer it.
Following our conversation about interrogative sentences we get down to the bottom of what the question is asking us to do and what information we will need to solve this problem. This requires my students to use their text clues. For example: [A factory in Detroit, Michigan built sports cars each month for a year. How many sports cars did it build in the year?] A response from student A: The question is asking us to find out how many cars were built in a year in Detroit. I need to know how many sports cars are built each month for an entire year. Student's need to understand what the question is asking them and this comes from understanding unit vocabulary and clue words that our author's give us in word problems.
In my math class we always start my word problems with taking out the words as Brian Bushart recommends. The first move I make with my students is reading the text twice. After reading I ask my students Why did the author write this text? What is the main idea or purpose of this text? Simple... yet it is getting my students to think about the text as a whole and not immediately rushing to the question without missing the key details.