What's the Question?

What makes a good Math teacher? 

"Use group problem-solving to stimulate students to apply their mathematical thinking skills (Artzt & Armour-Thomas, 1992)"

Working on our problems

As part of our continued math Talk, we have been spending a lot of time on word problems. I think it is important to students to approach them from all angles. This includes looking at them backwards by writing the questions. I loved this resource called What's the question?  by Brandi Wayment from The Research based Classroom.  I am firm believer in saving time and if someone has already created a great resource, use it! You then free up more time to work on other projects for your students. This is a great resource. Basically, it is a large set of sheets like the above that give the answer.

Love her story for how the last bird showed up. 

We walked through a demo. of this very problem as a class first. I told my students it is easiest to write the number sentence first.  We then decided that writing the story would be the next logical step before writing the question. Drawing the picture next would have been fine too. As for the drawing, we discussed how spending a lot of time drawing birds over and over again would not be a good use of our math time so we decided that it would be fine to use X's to represent the birds.

I then sent them off in pairs to work on their own problems. They were instructed to not use the problem we had come up with as a class. My students really enjoyed this activity. They are also enjoying working with their compass buddies. One thing that I have learned from this Capstone project so far has been that I was not giving my students enough time to work in pairs on math questions. It is so nice to be able to walk around and hear all of the math talk going on.

Their picture of the birds on the wire is great!