Hi 5th Grade Families,

This week 5th graders started their next unit in math – solving word problems! Students will be diving deeper into understanding how to solve word problems, how to write word problems, and how to differentiate between multiplication, division, subtraction, and addition depending on key words within the problem. Today, students worked on questioning when solving realistic situational problems.

Students were posed the situation, “You are hosting a barbecue that starts very soon and you want to make as many biscuits as possible with the ingredients you already have.” As a group, students shared out any questions that came to mind based on this situation. Students said things like, “how many people are we baking for?”, or “what do we need to make the biscuits?”, or “how much time do we have to make the biscuits?”, etc. After recording 20 + questions on the board, we narrowed it down to three main questions that would be necessary to figure out to be able to solve the problem:

1. What ingredients do we need?
2. How much of each ingredient do we have?
3. How much of each ingredient do we need?

As a class, we answered each of these questions, and then the fun started – solving the problem! It was great to see how so many students worked on solving this problem. There were no directions given, all that was expected was that they try out different ideas and see what worked and what was reasonable. Some students used division to solve the problem and as a class we discussed how we could have also solved it with subtraction.

Students did a great job thinking through this problem. I am excited to see them grow throughout this unit!

Stay tuned for some awesome work problems the students create 🙂