Last time we discussed the importance of key vocabulary. Today we are going to think about the numbers we need to pick out to find a solution to a worded problem.
We are then going to think about the amount of operations we will need to carry out to find the solution to the question. Don’t forget an operation is essentially the sum you are going to carry out for example add, divide, find a percentage of the amount.
Let’s just jump straight back in and return to our problem:
So we know from last time that we are going to calculate, find out, how much we spent on apples. We also know that there is going to be a reduction, money off, the overall price.
So let’s now highlight the important numbers in the problem and discuss why they are important:
So we have 10% off when we buy 10 apples or more. Well we can see Femi buys 15 so we know we can take 10% off. However at this point we should now realise that we need to find out what we are trying to find 10 % of before we can make the reduction.
So how many operations is this? And what are they?
Let’s go through them.
First the amount:
So that’s the 1st operation.
Now to find 10% of £3.30
£3.30 ÷ 10 = £0.33
So that was operation 2.
So to find our reduction we need to take £0.33
away from £3.30.
We obviously need to do some exchanging –
We take 10 from the tenscolumn and give it to the ones column and that is now 10.
Next we take 100 and give it to the tens column and that becomes 12.
Now that’s a lot and this is the typeof question you could meet in the primary curriculum from Year 4 onwards.
Practice will help you to identify how many steps you need to answer each question.
I hope you can see that by identifying numbers and operations you can see exactly what you need to do. Of course the other half of the issue is knowing what the vocabulary means as we discussed in the previous article.
For me mindset is the key here. You are going to make a lot of errors on the way and it’s the children that practice and keep going that get there in the end even if they do find it hard. Children always think their friend finds it easier and say to parents so and so just finds it easy I can’t get it like they do. But apart from one or two very lucky people most children have to work at this and the friend your child thinks knows it all would have had the same trials and tribulations.