Problem Solving Maths Questions Struggle

[IceniSky]

DD is in Y3 and is 8. Her last report had her as working towards in maths. She seems ok standard maths questions but the moment words are added in she can't tell whether she needs to add, subtract, multiply or divide and can't work the question out.

I've been working throught some Y1 and Y2 questions but the Y2 requires help. Y3 are too hard.

Is it simply practice or are there any techniques?

My DD uses these books to build confidence I did have to make sure she did them

You could try the I See Maths videos on YouTube - very visual explanations.

My ds had problem with word problems. We used RUCSAC method and a lot of practice.
www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zfxx6v4

How is her reading generally? I only ask as it was because of my DD’s poor maths score in year 4 (and the fact that she couldn’t do the worded questions and lost lots of marks) which triggered her dyslexia diagnosis.

Hi, her reading is where she is meant to be and she under stands the story. Although she doesn't sit and read like her friends and her stamina isn't great.

She can do 12÷2 and half 12 but if the question is 'John has 12 apples and gives half to Terry, how many apples do they have each?', she needs help to understand the question. If it then goes on to say 'He picked 12 more' she wont get it.

I have her underlining the numbers and important words.

Get her to look at the problem in a more visual way by drawing out the problem. So, draw 12 circles for the apples, 2 stick men, then get her to divide the apples between them. If she says ‘shares’ or ‘splits’, just prompt her to use the right mathematical term. Then loads of practice.

You could even go back to sweets in bowls if the drawings are too abstract. 12 sweets, 2 bowls.

When DD2 really struggled with maths, she would panic and shut down completely (to the extent that teachers withdrew her from assembly to give her a heads up on what they'd be learning that day in maths, so it wasn't new when they got to the lesson).

I also did a lot of work with her at home using numicon, bead bars, dienes, etc., to make it all more concrete.

Even today (she's year 8 now) we went back to breaking a word sum down into it's parts and building it back up because she panicked and started saying crazy numbers

With my children, I told them words in word problems were almost like a way to hide the number question from you, you had to see passed them and get to the numbers. We'd work through lots of problems together, practising over and over really helps the concepts go in. Asking questions about the problem often helped my children understand what was going on "how many apples do we start with ?" "How many people are mentioned in the question?" "What happens to the apples?" . I also tried to explain words like shared, split between etc meant divide. Then getting the child to look at a work problem and tell you step by step what they are going to do to solve it ensures that they are getting more confident at them.

Almost everyone finds word problems difficult so she's definitely not alone!
One issue (I found with my kids) is that when working through maths problems, they want to rush and get to the calculation so miss what the question is asking. So slowing down can help.
Another idea is to ignore the numbers and names of the characters involved, and just describe what is happening without using numbers , so
"Person 1 has some apples and they give some apples to person 2"
instead of
"Sunita is going shopping and buys 10 apples. She meets Timothy and gives him 3/4 of them."
You can then go on to work out what operation is needed (addition/subtraction etc.)
and then put in the numbers.
Word problems are about breaking down a situation into smaller steps which is a problem solving skill that is useful in lots of other walks of life so definitely worth practising perhaps in non-maths situations too.

DD1 really really struggled with this (she went on to get a first in MMath at uni, and now manages a statistics team - it is overcomeable ) and we framed it as the question "being sneaky" and trying to trick her. So as she automatically wanted to "beat" it, we had a good start. So then we worked on teasing out the numbers from the words and writing them down as a "sum", which was much easier for her to process.

We also talked round the question, and made it happen in front of us where we could - so "I have 12 apples here, and I'm going to give some of them to you - what's going to happen to the number of apples I have, oh look, that's a take away sum, lets write that down and put in the numbers".

Also, a small whiteboard and markers - I know some schools use them now, but that made a massive difference to DD, as she could rub out the mistakes rather than having to cross them out (we also had a perfectionism thing going on, which didn't help). She used her whiteboards all the way through to maths and further maths A levels