We have a lot of work to do in my class this year. After Wednesday’s reasonably successful problem-solving activity, I thought I’d give the students a few problems to solve from the Marcy Mathworks PUNCHLINE series while I dealt with first week paperwork. I intentionally chose a set of problems from the set that calls for students to “Draw a Picture” as a solution strategy. My goal was to reinforce the idea that even as they enter middle school, drawing a picture can be a great method of making sense of a problem.
After watching the groups attack the medicine problem on Wednesday, I thought for sure that this would be a simple exercise…a warm-up…but I was dead wrong. Although several students jumped right in and worked efficiently to solve the problems, the rest had that dear-in-the-headlights look. I reminded them to skip any problems they were stuck on and come back to them later, and I think there were a few that just kept skipping problems in a big loop. Sensing that, I asked students with good drawings to put them on the board for others who might not know how to draw a situation. That seemed to get the others moving, but some were still lost.
Some sample problems:
So, knowing now that this group will struggle with interpreting “story” problems, I think we’ll be doing a lot like this. Probably not 7 at a time like today; the students don’t have the endurance yet. Maybe just 1 or 2 for bell work, but then followed up with justification and critique. One thing is clear, these students don’t seem to have had much practice making sense of problems and so that is where we’ll start.
Rocking the Boat 