If I’m being honest, there have been times my fellow teachers and I have trouble deciphering some of the multi-step word problems thrown at students on math assessments. They aren’t always worded in the most child-friendly way, and some have so much information that it’s easy to get bogged down. It’s no wonder students get frustrated!
My students needed some tools to make these multi-step story problems more manageable, especially when we come across problems where there are multiple categories of information. Not to mention, some story problems don’t even give all the information up front. One of our favorite ways to organize these complicated problems was by making a table.
Make a Table
When a word problem describes multiple categories or groups of something, the first thing I tell my students to do is to pull this information out of the story and put it into a table.
The story problem itself can be overwhelming, and seeing the numbers in a simpler form might be all it takes for students to tackle the problem with confidence! Sometimes, not all of the information is given up front. Such as the example below, where students have to use the information given to find a missing piece of information before they can even try to solve the problem. In these cases, making a table is especially helpful as it keeps all of the information organized while they work through the problem.
We put together this fun group activity for students to practice making tables to organize information in word problems! Each student gets their own piece of information, and they have to work together to fill in their table and answer the question.
For more practice using this strategy, check out our Make a Table Strategy Task Cards!
Draw a Diagram
Another great tool for students to use when working through word problems is strip diagrams, especially for the more visual learners. Strip diagrams help organize the information in a word problem by showing the “whole” in one section, and the “parts” in the other.
In some cases, students are asked to choose diagrams and/or equations to represent story problems. If they already have practice using strip diagrams to solve multi-step problems, this will be easier for them to master as well. This matching game is a fun way for students to practice taking the information from a strip diagram and presenting it in equation form!
We also made an interactive notebook activity using strip diagrams that is a great introduction to this skill.
Build Confidence!
Model breaking down these multi-step problems into small, simple parts. They’ll see that these questions aren’t “hard,” they just require a little more time to put all the pieces together.
I like to introduce multi-step problems using interactive notebook activities like the ones below. Each step of the problem gets its own square, and I encourage students to write a brief explanation of the different steps to ensure they have a good understanding of why that step was necessary to solve the problem.
We’re the Nolans: teachers, parents, and resource creators.
Mr. Nolan graduated in 2007 from Texas A&M and began teaching 5th grade math & science. Mrs. Nolan graduated from Baylor University in 2012 and earned her Master’s degree in English while teaching 4th grade. We’ve combined our collective 20+ years experience teaching upper-elementary to bring you the information and products found here on our website.
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