Smartboard

I am a little behind in my blogging, so I am catching up now. I don't know where the year has gone!
In the past month, 2nd grade has been working on story problems. I taught the kids the clue words, we worked on visualizing the story problem, and we talked about how we subtract if we know the total and how we add if we are looking for the total. As you all probably know, story problems can be difficult for students. I know they were for me at that age! I decided to "ease" my students into story problems. I created two smart board lessons that had pictures to go with the story problems. I felt this was a good visual for students as they were learning the clue words. For example, if I had an addition story problem about bees, (3 + 4 ) I had a group of 3 bees and then 4 bees. This really helped my visual learners make the connection, and also helped some students get an idea of what visualizing is. For a subtraction problem I had about ducks in a pond, students were able to actually move the ducks out of the pond.
Overall, I think this was successful. Students seem to really understand the concept of visualizing, which in turn helped them to successfully solve story problems.

Sara