pensando en matemáticas

This weekend, I’m much less grumpy than I was last weekend.  This is partly due to the fact that we had Thursday off for Tropical Storm Isaac (which didn’t hit us).  This day was a gift from God that I was able to use to truly rest and recoup from the start of the school year. 

Speaking of school...since I’m predominately teaching math this year, people have asked me to share some ideas that I’ve found work well.  So that is the subject of this post. 

To start the year in all my classes, I’m reviewing basic number skills and concepts before we continue in the curriculum.  One skill that our students especially struggle with is solving word problems.  To try to help the kids understand that each problem is a story that requires thought in order to solve, I had them create their own stories.  So far, I’ve been heavily focusing on the pairs of numbers that add up to 10 (1+9, 2+8, etc.) because this is extremely helpful in developing mental math skills.

So with my 9 year-olds, I had them each randomly choose a number family (e.g. 6, 4, 10) around which to create a word problem.  Then they had to decide whether they wanted to make a story using addition or subtraction of their numbers. I modeled how to turn a number sentence (e.g. 10 – 6 = 4) into a word problem, and then I guided the kids as they wrote their own stories based on their number sentences.  They each wrote a story as best they could; after I checked it, they practiced signing it.  When they were polished and ready, I recorded them on video. Here is Kioney’s story:

I'll show them their videos next week to reinforce these concepts.  Then we’ll show the videos to the other classes to get them thinking about math, too. 

The kids seemed to really enjoy this activity, so it is probably something I will continue throughout the year as they learn multiplication and division facts.  Then at the end of the year, we’ll watch them and see if we can solve them all.