Crunchy Time

3rd grade math TAKS test is on April 27th. That doesn't leave us with too much time left.

Aside from kids still struggling with the concepts, we have at least covered a lot of the material. Operations, patterns, rounding, measurement, fractions, geometry, etc.

The past few weeks and the next few weeks have been and will be over tougher stuff: The Word Problems.

Most word problems follow some sort of logical path. Most 3rd graders do not. So while it might make perfect sense that if somebody gives away 5 pencils, they should then have LESS pencils than they started with... prompting subtraction...that's not always the way it works out.

Last week, we focused on Two-Step Word Problems. Talk about your basic whipping. There are THREE numbers in the problem now?? We HAVE to add/subtract them all at the same time!!

Usually, when we walk through a problem together, logic prevails. The kids, even the low ones, can tell me when they should add, when they should subtract. The problem arises when the kids face the questions on their own. The main problem being that many of the kids don't actually read the problem or think about what the words mean.

Remember that Far Side cartoon captioned, "What dogs hear?" where the owner said, "Spot, fetch my slippers! Good boy, Spot, that's a good boy, Spot!" and the dog hears, "Spot, blah blah blah blah blah blah, Spot, blah blah blah blah Spot!"

Word problems act in much the same way for a lot of kids.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah 15 blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah 3 blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah?

Ooooooh, I spy, with my tiny little eye, two numbers!! The magic 8 ball in my head says to.... ADD them!

Then the teacher, ME, reads their answer and wonders why the heck each friend has 18 hotdogs, if Alex started with 15 hotdogs and split them up evenly among 3 friends. (Nevermind the fact that they added hotdogs and friends and magically turned them all to hotdogs.)

We start "Reasonableness"-type questions tomorrow. A bit too unreasonable, if you ask me.

I'd like to use a life line

We've been doing division in class lately. Perhaps other school districts start teaching division before third grade, for almost all of our kids, they are learning and practicing division for the first time.

It makes me very happy when one of my kids can actually explain to me what a division problem means. Most of my kids probably could NOT explain it, but one of my girls did today, so I was pleased.

I asked why we could not do 3 divided by 15. She explained it perfectly, saying that we could not start with three things and put them into 15 equal groups because there weren't enough things to start with.

On the other side of logic, I wrote this word problem on the board today:

Erin wants to share her cookies with her 2 sisters. She has 18 cookies. How many cookies will each sister get?

I let my kids work with a partner and gave them a few minutes to come up with a picture, a number sentence, and an answer.

Every one of them told me the answer was 9 cookies. Wait, I take that back. Every one of them told me that 18 divided by 2 was the way to solve the problem. One girl said that 18 divided by 2 equaled 7.

When I told them (much to their shock) that 9 cookies was NOT the answer to the problem, and that I would give them a couple more minutes to go back and very carefully read the problem again, they all saw the trick and came up with the right answer.

I'm just not sure how to teach the skill of carefulness and scrutiny. Especially when I have a group of kids that don't really want to read the words but would rather just grab the numbers and perform a random operation on them...