Math Problem Solving Journals

So I thought I'd blog today about one of my faves- Math Problem Solving Journals!!! Our school's "School Improvement Goals" for the past few years have been numeracy centered and we have been focusing on problem solving throughout the grades. Last year, when we started talking about what we would do in Kindergarten to help develop and work on the foundations of problem solving skills, I came across some great ideas on Kindergarten Kindergarten.

My teaching partner and I decided that we would start weekly math problem solving journals. We make up a word problem (based on the different math skills we are currently working on) and the students paste it into their journal. We do a shared math lesson and activities before having the students work independently to solve their math problems. Before we started the journals, we talked about important terms and the reference page at the beginning of their journals and the steps involved in problem solving (and hung anchor charts in our classrooms).

  

* The reference page at the beginning of our journals. (Sorry for the sideways picture.. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to turn this thingy around)*

The challenge is making sure that the language we use in the word problems is very basic French and easily understood by our students, otherwise we're just stuck on understanding what the problem is in the first place and we don't get to the solving part. Here are a few of the problems we've done lately.

*We start with something very simple like this- "Write your name. How many letters are there in your name?"

*Then we work our way up to tougher problems like this one. It roughly translates to: " Pogo the penguin has more fish than Piwi and Zulu has less fish than Piwi. Piwi has 6 fish. How many fish do Pogo and Zulu have? " (Check for later posts with downloads of our math problems in English and French)