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Word problems
Posted:
Nov 26, 1995 8:52 PM
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Good morning, I've just read a note from Rex Boggs. He refers to the use of one's own creative powers when developing word problems. In all the mathematics documents I've seen there has been some reference, either explicit or implicit, to providing children with the opportunity to solve teacher generated word problems. I would say that teacher posed problems could be far superior to those extracted from reference texts. They have the opportunity to focus on the children as learners of relevant information at an opportune time. However, what type of word problems do "we teachers" generate for our pupils. I am currently looking at those word problems I created for my grade 3/4 youngsters a couple of years ago. I thought that they were, at the time, rather novel and interesting word problems from a rather "up-to-date" teacher. But, in the light of my recent reading .....
I would welcome members of this list forwarding me, either directly or through the list, a sample of the word problems they have created for their elementary school class. It would be interesting to see how our ability to create word problems reflects the underlying concepts of the four arithmetical operations.
I'll show you mine ....
During the week we collected for our December excursion. Here are the amounts we collected each day: Monday - $25.75 Tuesday - $30.90 Wednesday - $15.45 Thursday - $36.05 Friday - $10.30. How much did we collect this week?
(This is one of a series of related money word problems for which the children were allowed to use a calculator. The object was to establish the operation to be used by grade 3 children.)
Now you show me yours....
Your appreciatively, K
Kevin J. Maguire Telephone: +61 3 9478 2080 Graduate School of Education La Trobe University Bundoora VIC Australia
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