Read the following problem and think about how a student might solve it. There are 250 students in the fifth grade. Three-fifths of them speak two languages. How many speak two languages? As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been introducing tape diagrams, or bar models, to students and teachers recently as a way to solve word …
Recently, I was working with fourth-graders on the following word problem from the 2013 New York State test: Ms. Turner drove 825 miles in March. She drove 3 times as many miles in March as she did in January. She drove 4 times as many miles in February as she did in January. What was the …
They know the math but they can’t do word problems. They can do all the problems on the page correctly, but they skip the word problems at the end. It’s a reading comprehension problem. They don’t understand what they are reading. The dreaded word problem. In many classes I taught, students weren’t used to being …