Anyone can do the arithmetic once someone hands them the sum. The hard part is working out what the sum is.
Not started yet.
Students will learn the four-step plan for solving a problem: Explore, Plan, Solve, Examine. The arithmetic in this lesson is easy on purpose. The skill being taught is deciding what to work out and knowing whether the answer makes sense.
Explore means working out what you already know and what you're being asked. Plan means deciding what to do with those numbers, and estimating roughly what the answer should be. Solve means doing it. Examine means checking the answer against the estimate, and working backwards to see if you land where you started.
This is the part of the lesson worth defending. A student can get the answer to almost any of these from a phone in about four seconds. What a phone will not do is tell him the answer should have been between ten and twenty hours, which is the only thing that catches a wrong answer.
So on this page the calculation stays locked until an estimate is entered. That's not a gimmick. It's the order the textbook itself teaches, and it's the habit that survives after the arithmetic is forgotten.
Two places. The first is Explore, where a problem hands you a number you don't need. The second is Examine, which most students skip because they believe the answer as soon as the calculator shows it. If he does the check every time on the easy problems, he still has the habit on the hard ones.
Ask him to make up a problem of his own before the end of the lesson: something he genuinely wants to know, like how long a drive takes or what a full shopping cart comes to. Proposing the question is half of what this lesson teaches, and it's the half no worksheet can ask for.
Read-aloud is not available in this browser. Try Chrome or Safari.
Before You Start
The words this lesson uses. Tap a card to see what it means, then come back to them whenever a question uses one.
Part One
Questions about the story you just read. Pick your answer straight off, or press Find it in the story if you would rather hunt for the sentence first.
Part Two
The word cards are at the top of this page. Look back at them as often as you need, then answer.