Let’s talk about reading comprehension in your math classroom. You may not think it’s important or relevant to teaching math, but I’m here to convince you otherwise
I’ll be honest with you. Your students are afraid of word problems for multiple reasons. To start, they have an ingrained belief that word problems are hard and confusing. Most of the time, they don’t even know where to start.
If the problem is that they don’t know where to start when solving word problems, we can take that and think about what makes a word problem different from a regular math problem. Word problems have words, and math problems have mostly numbers.
Seems obvious, right? The challenge is teaching students how to take the words from plain English and translate them to make sense mathematically.
Think about teaching word problems like teaching a different language. How can you break it down as much as possible to give your students the right idea and knowledge of where to start? Identify the questions that you ask yourself when solving a word problem that your students might not think about because they don’t know that those questions are important.
You can teach reading comprehension and math the same way that it’s taught in English class. When you’re teaching your students how to solve a word problem, if they don’t know how to translate the words into equations and mathematical terms, there’s no way that they are going to be successful in solving that problem.
One of my favorite ways to introduce solving word problems in my classroom is with a graphic organizer. It is a very simple strategy. All you need to do is fold the paper in half two times so that you have four separate squares. Then in each of the boxes write addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
Your students go through each box and write down all of the words that they associate with each operation. This is a great discussion starter and it only takes 10 to 15 minutes at the beginning of your lesson. Your students will share their own ideas, be able to hear others’ ideas, and think about math in a deeper way than just solving a problem with the formula.
Once you have translated all of the plain English into math terms, you can break down the problem itself. The first prompting question that I always ask my students is “what is the question asking us?”.
From what I have seen in my own classroom, my students get so overwhelmed by all of the words. They don’t take a second to think about what the problem means and what the question is actually asking them to do.
As soon as they understand what the question is asking them, then they can then figure out what the variable in the problem is going to be. Once they have the variable figured out they can add the rest of the information into the equation or expression that they’re creating.
Use a variety of problem solving strategies
Another really helpful strategy for solving word problems, especially geometry-based word problems, is drawing a diagram. Diagrams will really help your visual learners and provide a different way to think about the problem.
One of the most important parts of teaching is differentiation and being able to model different ways of solving problems. Problem solving is not one size fits all and having a variety of solving methods in your toolbox will be invaluable.
My final thoughts about teaching reading comprehension in math class:
It’s important for math teachers to understand that students most likely haven’t been taught reading comprehension skills explicitly in their previous classes and solving word problems can be very intimidating.
Remember that word problems don’t need to be complicated if your students are given enough time to practice their problem solving skills.
Set the expectation that your students solve one word problem everyday (or even just three times a week). Over time, they will get more comfortable with understanding how to turn plain English sentences into mathematical expressions. Consistency is the most important part of teaching problem solving skills.
My last piece of advice for you is to integrate writing into your math class for just 5 minutes a day. Reading comprehension and writing go hand in hand. When your students get more comfortable with writing out their thoughts, they will see that math has meaning behind the numbers.