What's Your Math Problem!?! Book Study Chapter 3

I am linking up with

Jennifer Smith-Sloane from 4mulaFun

Meg Anderson  from Fourth Grade Studio

Jamie Riggs from MissMathDork

and Jennifer Findley from Teaching to Inspire 5th Grade

for this book study on What's Your Math Problem!?!



 If you missed my previous posts you can find them here:

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
                                         

Chapter 3 - Getting Started Strategies

This chapter focuses on four strategies:

• Restate the problem in your own words

Before restating the problem, Gojak suggests teaching the students to read the problem three times.

1. The first read is to provide a general familiarity with the information in the problem.
2. The second read helps you to put the problem into your own terminology, focusing on the specifics of the problem.
3. The third read helps you reduce the problem to only relevant ideas.

I'm not sure that I agree with this format exactly, but I do like the idea of having them read a problem multiple times.

• Identify wanted, given, and needed information

Gojak emphasizes the need to model this strategy.  She recommends getting students in the habit of recording wanted, needed, and given information so that they will focus on theses areas.

• Identify a subgoal

This strategy is for multi-step problems or problems where the student may not have all of the information readily available in the problem.  They may need to solve something or research something first.

• Select appropriate notation

This strategy shows students how to show their thinking in solving a problem.

This chapter reminded me of a resource that I was given during our unit revision workshop.

You can find a printable version of the poster above here.