End of the Year Activities

Kindergarten math word problems are taught methodically. Your students are young, but their number sense and ability to add, subtract, and group numbers together is so innate. You'd be amazed at the capacity of your students to solve kindergarten math word problems with different strategies, and using different tools.

The way I begin is by giving my class a math word problem. I do a shared reading of it (or allow them to read themselves, depending on the time of year and level of difficulty of the text). Then, I let them have time to think about it, and solve it on their own. I give them no guidelines, or hints. Several students will undoubtedly come up with the answer, and be anxious to share it! I inculcate it in them to NOT call out or share the answer! As they work, I walk around and observe what strategies students are using. This is important for later on in the lesson. It gives me an idea of who to call on when we're at the carpet discussing our problem solving strategy.

Once students have mostly finished, we come together at the carpet, and I ask for volunteers. They are very eager to share the answer with everyone! They have difficulty explaining their thought process. I ask them questions to help with their metacognition: "how did you get that answer?" and "what did you use to help you?"

Slowly, they begin sharing their thought process based on the questions I ask. Most students at this point zone out and are not paying attention to what the student is saying, since we've already shared the answer. I explain that listening to this person's strategy today may help them solve tomorrow's math word problem, and they may get called on when we come to the carpet.

After today's student has explained his thought process, I begin an anchor chart that reads "I can solve problems by..." and I add the strategy the student today used. I explain that we can solve kindergarten math word problems by using this strategy.

Everyday I choose a different student to share their strategy for solving the math word problem. I try to choose a student that used a different strategy the next day. I add strategies to our anchor chart as the days pass, and students begin to see they have multiple ways of solving similar problem types.

The first few days I don't tell them to use any strategies because I want them to come up with ways to solve the word problems on their own. The idea is they are learning from each other. If days have passed and I notice no one is implementing a new strategy, I may choose to model a new one to add to our anchor chart. This usually happens with the number line strategy, which students are typically hesitant to use for math word problems.

Later on you can increase the complexity of the problem. I've done so using Cognitively Guided Instruction problem types. In the scenario below, I posed the problem: "There were 5 trees. Each tree had 3 apples. How many apples were there in all?" Here is how my students solved the problem:

Drawing a picture to solve our kindergarten math word problem.

Using blocks to solve kindergarten math word problems