Friday, Sept 7

After being in Teacher B's 1/3 class, I consulted with Teacher R today to see how she would use Thinking Maps to solve one of the word problems from AA LM1.1A. It was really funny watching Teacher R try to solve a math problem! She misread it, then tried to do a Tree Map and screwed that up, then we tried replacing the variables with numbers and she still got it wrong. Of course, she was laughing the whole time! Anyway, what helped her the most was first doing a circle map to sort of the important words from the problem from the unimportant words. Next, she organized the important words with a Tree Map. She tried another problem that was somewhat similar and she was much, much more efficient. The Circle Map followed by a Tree Map may be a good strategy for a variety of word problems.