Introducing children to maths word problems the easy way!

If you begin maths word problems from a point of understanding, and your children get lost along the way, you can always go back to what they know. 

Keep It Simple
Once children have learnt the basic math skills of multiplication, division, addition and subtraction they will be introduced to simple word problems. Word problems will enable children to use their skills of multiplication, division, addition and subtraction to solve every day problems like: “3 children have 6 sweets each. How many sweets do they have altogether?” Many children will find relating their math skills to word problems a difficult task. The reason that they may find this difficult is because they can’t “see” the problem.

Draw a picture to solve the problem
If a child can’t see the problem in their mind in the form of a picture or perhaps a movie the problem could be too abstract for them to comprehend or perhaps they are not used to making pictures in their mind to solve problems. To help children solve word problems encourage them to draw pictures by leaving enough space on worksheets for a picture.

Example question:
“3 children have 6 sweets each. How many sweets do they have altogether?”

Further developments
Once children have a firm grasp of word problems by drawing pictures of problems they can move forward to visualising the problem in their mind. See: “Teaching children how to visualise” below. Help children with this task by writing a word problem on the board and ask the children to all think of a picture or a movie in their head that would represent the problem. Teachers can demonstrate the first word problem by talking through the problem and visualising pictures to parts of the problem. “3 children have 6 sweets each. How many sweets do they have altogether?”

• Teacher: “I can see 3 children all standing next to each other”
• Teacher: “I can see 6 sweets”
• Teacher: “That’s 6 sweets for the first child, 6 sweets for the second child and 6 sweets for the third child. (Teacher writes 6 on the board three times and adds them together or 3x6=18).

Visualisation
Visualising is an extremely useful technique to master not only for maths but also for spelling and it can be very simple to learn. Many children will instinctively know how to do it, others will need help.

How to visualise
Ask children what colour their bike is, or something similar.

• “Where is it?” (It might be the garden shed)
• “Can you imagine your bike in the shed in your mind”
• “Did you see a picture of the bike in the shed, or a picture of the shed?”

What ever they saw they were visualising. You can also call out objects for example apple, banana, pear. Ask the children if they saw an apple when you said apple, what colour was their apple, red, green, red and green?
Children may need to close their eyes to visualise. Practice visualising techniques a few times if necessary.

You may find some maths word problem worksheets below:

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