The past couple of weeks we have been working on a math project. Students have enacted, solved, and finally created their own story (or word) problems. These story problems revolve around a sea creature theme that has been introduced in our math program, through our bucket of sea creatures at a Work Place and through our January calendar pieces. During our first day of this problems & investigations unit, the children were asked to choose which of the five different sea creatures (seal pup, mother seal, mother whale, whale calf, or hungry shark) they wanted to play the part of in our story problem dramatization. After the children chose their characters, we created a graph and made "I notice" statements about the graph. Then the next day we created and acted out story problems, such as "There were two seal pups and a mother seal on the rock. Two seal pups left to eat. How many seals were left on the rock?". For each story problem, the children acted the problem out and then solved the problem aloud. We did many of these problems and had a great time!
After acting the problems out, we worked on individual whiteboards to solve some story problems presented in picture form about these sea creatures. An example of a problem was "Three whales were swimming under water. Each whale had two large fins. How many fins are under water?". The children solved these problems using pictures and numbers and then shared their strategies with the group. Finally we began creating our own story problems. The children first chose which sea creature they wanted to pose a problem about: shark, whale, or seal. Then drew pictures of their sea creatures and talked about the question they wanted the classmates to solve. The problems they created are excellent! They created these problems themselves and we only helped with the wording. Some children created problems such as, "There is one mother seal underwater and one seal pup on top of the water. How many seals altogether?" and " There are 6 sharks altogether. 2 sharks came up out of the water. How many sharks are still underwater?. We have been using our addition and subtraction strategies to solve one anothers problems! Way to go Kindergarteners!
