Repackaging Style Word Problems: Transforming Missing Part Word Problems

Transcript

Welcome fellow Recovering Traditionalists to: Repackaging Style Word Problems: Transforming Missing Part Word Problems

I shared last week that I was looking through the book Putting Essential Understanding of Multiplication and Division into Practice in Grades 3–5 by NCTM when I came across something that is going to be the focus of three episodes. Last week was the first one: Upleveling Missing Part Activities and this is part 2.

As a quick refresher – Missing part activities are where students work with incomplete information.

A typical Missing Part Activity is when students know that 8 is the whole and 5 is one part, they need to determine that 3 is the missing part. And a typical missing part word problem might be something like: 

“Christina has 8 cookies.  5 of them are chocolate chip, the rest are oatmeal.  How many oatmeal cookies does Christina have?”  

BUT, in the Multiplication and Division into Practice book, I discovered a different way to write some missing part word problems.

In the book, they called these ‘repackaging tasks’:

These relate to the type of missing part problems we talked about in the last episode: 

The first word problem is essentially 18 x 6 is the same as ____ x 12

These aren’t the straightforward problems that your students are used to and so you might be tempted to have the students pluck out the numbers and write the equation.  Instead we want them to use the Lesh Models.  This is the Contextual Model…encourage them to visualize what’s going on and model the problem and yes you can do the abstract symbols of the equations, but that’s not the main goal.  

As I said last episode, the reason problems like this are such an important addition to put into your Missing Part activities is that you are building a more cohesive sense of what equality is in mathematics and you are helping them build big mathematical ideas through the properties of numbers they are developing while thinking through these types of problems which will also help them develop thinking strategies for operating with numbers.

The image I shared gave two examples for multiplication but here’s some for addition:

Christina has a bag with 8 chocolate chip cookies and another bag with 7 chocolate chip cookies.  She wants to give one bag to her friend Rosalba who has a family of 10 people.  She needs to repackage the cookies so one bag has 10.  How many cookies will she have in the other bag?

Ann Elise is organizing her books on the shelf.  She has 28 books on the bottom shelf and 37 books on the top shelf.  She wants to reorganize the books so her top shelf is full.  She has space for 40 books on the top shelf. If she fills that top shelf with books from the bottom, how many books will she have left on the bottom shelf?

Every day in math your students should be doing a Number Routine, Contextual/Word Problem, and a Game.  Last episode was a Number Talk for upleveling your Missing Part activities, this week was upleveling word problems that have a missing part and then next week the final episode on missing part will be a couple of games I love.

Keep doing the traditional missing part word problems, but this style builds so many more mathematical ideas and helps your students start to see they can break apart numbers to help them essentially make a more friendly problem when adding or multiplying.  They see that they can take numbers apart and create a new problem that is easier for them to solve but still gives them the same answer.

Until next week, my fellow Recovering Traditionalists, keep letting your students explore math, keep questioning, and most importantly, keep Building Math Minds.