Story Problems

Today I taught story problems to the students. In the past, the students had used white boards with markers on the rug. I remember taking a few minutes to pass out the materials--white boards, markers, and erasers--always having a few children who wanted a different color marker than the one received (though that can be an easy fix with each marker being the same color). This year, each student went to grab their ipad off their table (we had used then earlier) and came and sat on the rug. Less than 20 seconds. Ohhh, I like that timing.

The students opened their educreations app and we began. I had my ipad projected through apple tv on the white board for all students to see. I began telling story problems first introducing the class on how to represent the problems with pictures. I gave examples of how to quickly draw different objects.

I incorporated the students' names in the stories, which the students loved. I was also able to show the class each other's work by projecting their pictures on the screen for all to see. What was really cool is that the students started to use different colors when drawing their pictures demonstrating the different problems and solutions.

Here is are two students' work:

The story problem was "Willie and Sam have to share this 3 scoop ice cream. How many scoops will Willie and Sam get if they share it equally?" You can see how this student used red and orange colors to show who got each scoop.

The story problem was "Nyema had 2 cookies and Taylour had 3 cookies in their lunches. How many cookies did they have in all?" This student labeled the number of cookies and then wrote the number sentence.

I felt like this lesson with ipads allowed students to more easily and quickly learn from each (through projecting on the screen for all students to see and hear the answer from the student themselves). They wanted to share their work and have it projected. It also saved a lot of time with clean up and set up. They students just walked to the rug with their ipad and walked back to their tables when done with the lesson. Even though no instruction was given for the students to use different colors to help draw their picture representation, they used them and really added understanding to their representations. Finally, the attention to this lesson was high. I gave little if any redirection as they were VERY engaged. This is not always true with previous story problem lessons with white boards.