BLOG SEVEN

"How prepared do you feel in effectively teaching your students in reading word problems?  Is this one of your strengths?  A weakness? 

Have you started to plan to the Common Core Standards?  If you have, how is that going?  If you haven’t, why not?  What support do you need?"

We are currently focusing on reading word problems in my Algebra Extensions class, so I feel that teaching this is one of my strengths.  I have taught them multiple methods to solve word problems, but the consistent things among these methods is to always reread the problem and to underline any important information.  We have also gone over important definitions of words that often come up in word problems, and what mathematical operation these words represent.  One method that has been effective is the star method.  The paper is split into five parts [looks like a star].  The first section is where they put the actual word problem and where they underline and circle important parts.  In the second section they write what they already know about the answer.  The third section is for coming up with a method to solve the problem and/or setting up equations, and the fourth section is where they actually solve the equation.  The final section is where they put the answer, as well as determine if the answer makes sense.

My district has emphasized planning to the Common Core Standards in the math department.  Our main focus right now is implementing the eight standards for mathematical practice in our daily lesson plans.  In every lesson we are supposed to use standards one, make sense of problems and persevere in solving them, and six, attend to precision.  In addition to these two standards we are supposed to choose one more standard to focus on during every lesson.  We have a lot of support in our district regarding common core in math, so it is going well so far. I have been really trying to work in standard four, which is modeling with mathematics   I try to always make real world connections with whatever we are learning in class that day.