Week 5

This assignment asked the students to find the information that was not useful to solve the problem.  It then asked students to solve the problem.  The big idea of the assignment is understand what information is necessary to complete a problem.  I think this assignment was relatively successful.  One of my only concerns with this worksheet was that the questions did not apply to any real life applications.  The problems were set up as, "There are 13 empire penguins at the zoo, and 11 river otters.  Susan already saw 19 rockhopper penguins.  How many penguins did Susan see in all?"  I would change this assignment and allow it to be relate to real life situations.  You could create a problem about baking, or shopping, or something classroom related.  This will allow the students to see the question as a problem that needs to be solved, and not just math.  If they only see math than the actual words do not mean anything.  My students were struggling to view this problem as an actual problem that needs to be solved, and not just numbers on a page.   This caused a lot of students to struggle to finish this worksheet on their own (this was only the front page, there were 3 more pages.)