Making story problems relevant. (Teacher to Teacher)

My third-grade class struggled with understanding "story" problems - that is, mathematics problems written in sentences - until one day I decided to put problems into a familiar form making them relevant to children's lives.

I took grocery-store circulars for four local stores and cut out advertisements, with pictures, of products that could be purchased at these stores. I glued the advertisements on a separate piece of poster board for each store and wrote the store's name at the top. The children had all been shopping at some time in their lives, and although they had seen these advertisements many times before, they really hadn't paid much attention to them.

I made one poster that had actual boxes, lids, plastic bags, and so on, from products around my home. This poster included the prices of the products beneath the items, as well as UPC codes. This poster was called "The Home Store."

Children looked at these posters and thought of questions they would like to know about shopping for these products. We brainstormed different things that a shopper might need to know before deciding what to buy from one of these stores. Then I made a few sample story problems that could be written from these posters, and the children solved them. Most problems involved simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication, for example, "If I bought toothpaste for $1.25 and a toothbrush for $0.99 at Appletree grocery store, how much money would I have to pay?" The students worked the problems and we discussed the answers.

Next I made up one problem that didn't have enough information and asked them to work it. After a few frustrating moments, they realized what I'd done and asked for the missing information so they that could solve the problem. From this example we brainstormed the necessary components for composition of good story problems. We decided that our problems should have four things:

1. The items to be purchased 2. The number of the items to be purchased 3. The price of the items 4. The name of the store from which the items would be purchased

With these guidelines in mind, students set out to compose three to five problems each. They used each other's names in the problems to make them more personal. Some students used calculators to obtain their solutions.