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8
Mini-Lessons
Springboards into Great
Word Problem Premises
Math Mentor Texts, Poems,
Songs, Believe It or Not Stories and
Shared Experiences
Word problems don’t have to be boring! We must bring the imagina-
tion of Disney®^ to the situation. If done right, students can be taught
to love word problems like they love good movies.There are many different ways to get students interested in story prob-
lems. Teachers should use math mentor texts, believe it or not stories,
real-life stories, poems and shared experiences. All of these types of
story starters can be informative, instructive and engaging. They also
serve dual purposes, because you can use them for not only math but
also other areas in the curriculum such as science, social studies and
even art. There are so many resources available to get you started
down this exciting path. In this chapter, I^ will discuss some of those
resources.
Math Mentor Texts
Math mentor texts are picture books that are written with a math premise.
There are so many good books out there now and many of them have
been recorded into videos. Use these as springboards into understanding
the math through story problems. I^ have created tables of a few of my
favorites (see Figures^ 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4). What I^ truly love about many
math mentor texts is that there are tons of math lesson plans that go along
with them to help teach the concepts. Furthermore, many have video ver-
sions as well. Let’s take a look at a few lessons.