Word Problems...most teachers either love them or hate them! In the past several years, I've had a change of heart about word problems. I used to hate them-just because I didn't know how to help my kiddos work through them but now I love them!
A few years ago, our grade level group was having a lot of trouble with word problems. We even formed an intervention group to work on word problems. Each week we would meet with them and give them a set of word problems, go through all the steps of read it, mark keywords, solve and think "Does that make sense?" but it didn't seem to be making any difference. I remember sitting there one day thinking to myself, "I'm giving them lots of practice with word problems but am I really teaching them how to solve them? They still don't seem to understand what to do with them." So, I walked down the hall to my dear friend and colleague who was our math specialist (at the time) and repeated what I had just thought it my mind to her. I explained that no matter what "keywords" were in the problems I gave them, they still didn't read and get a picture in their mind of what was going on in the problems. They just added-on ALL of them! AND I was frustrated and felt like I was failing them!
She looked at me, smiled in her calming way and then the conversation started. I explained that I didn't feel like I was "teaching" them how to solve word problems and she reminded me of the need to teach the CONCEPT before the procedure in her reassuring, you got this girl, kind of way. So it began...my LOVE of TEACHING how to solve word problems!
Fast forward through several years of practice, lots of research and several staff developments and while I am still continually looking for new information on how to teach word problems, I finally think I now "teach" word problems, not just practice them-YAY!
So I want to share my planning ideas with you!
Problem Types
The first step for me, was to be sure I understood the different problem types. There's so many and can be called so many different things. I've presented staff development on this and it's NOT easy. A lot of us teachers have real reservations with teaching word problem types because we didn't learn the different types in school ourselves. That's all the more reason that we owe it to our students to help them understand them.
Our state standards break them down like this...
Add To
Take From
Put Together/Take Apart
Compare
So what's the difference?
The first two types, Add To and Take From, involve an ACTION or change. For example, you have some balloons and some fly away (take from) or there are farm animals in the barnyard and some more enter (add to). These are sometimes called start-change-result word problems.
The next kind is Put Together/Take Apart, in other words part-part-whole type problems. These involve a group of things that can be put together or split apart. For example, you have apples and some are red and some are green. There's no action of adding more or some going away. You are just simply putting parts together to make a whole group. As the description suggests, these can also be called part-part-whole type problems.
Finally, there's the Compare problems. These are just like the name implies. They compare 2 or more things. For example, "How many more people like pepperoni pizza than cheese pizza?" I like to set the stage for this type of problem during measurement and graphing units. In this type the problems have a bigger part, smaller part and a difference.
Now, if this is old news then give yourself a pat on the back for already being an amazingly awesome teacher, but don't feel bad if you've heard of these types but don't feel like you fully understand them. You can hear this over and over again in staff development but you just have to set aside a little time and think about the differences yourself, then you're off and ready to go!
Stay tuned to the Curriculum Geek for more on TEACHING word problems!
No comments:
Post a Comment