Grades 3-5 Math Problem Solving in Action_ Getting Students to Love Word Problems

Mini-Lessons ◆ 137

Real-Life Shared Experiences

Shared experiences are activities that students do to understand and play
around with the concepts. For example, every year at one of the schools
I worked at in the Bronx, we would have a math Olympics to reinforce
measurement concepts. All of the upper elementary grades participated,
and they would get class winners who would then represent them in the
finalist competitions. We had wonderful games like How far can you blow
the cotton ball? The students had to blow the cotton ball across the table
through a straw in 4 puffs. We would then measure how many inches or
centimeters they blew their cotton balls. We would have a meter
jump—which entailed students jumping and then measuring to see who
jumped the farthest. We would do things like milliliter races where the
students had to fill a small glass bottle with an eyedropper. It was just a
variety of games that were kid-friendly, academically-rich and extremely
engaging. Since everybody did it, we could then relate to these units of
measure and make up problems about them that everyone understood.
The teachers and the students would write word problems about the
different events. For example:

1. What is the best unit of measure to weigh a small rock?


2. Could you use pounds to talk about how far you jumped?


3. If John jumped 89 cm his first jump, 99 cm his second jump and
   1.5 m his third jump, then how far did he jump altogether? Was it
   more or less than 3 m, explain how you know?


4. If Maribel jumped a total of 2 yards, how many feet did she jump?

Key Points

• Math mentor texts are great shared experiences.


• Poems and songs can springboard into interesting math topics.


• Believe it or not stories help students to make sense of math in the
  real world.


• Shared experiences provide great opportunities to apply math.

Summary

Getting all students to love word problems means that they are working
on problems that interest them. Those problems are not necessarily in the
textbooks. That is not to say students shouldn’t be able to solve the