Problem-Solving Words for Elementary Math

Hi, this is Betsy Weigle from Classroom Caboodle. I’m going to show you a great tool I made for my students around problem solving. All righty, so here we go. So we are in the depth of working on problem solving or word problems in my classroom, and my students are really struggling with understanding what some of the words that were in a word problem or story problem meant. We call those “magic words.” So I made a poster to help clarify things for my students. It’s our magic words for problem solving anchor chart. You can see I have addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. For example, anytime they’re reading a word problem and they see the word “each,” they can just look at the anchor chart and see that “each” is telling that this is going to be either multiplication or division. So what they need to do next is just stop, picture the problem, and see which one would make sense when solving. Also that word “difference” often confuses my students. So they know they can just look at the anchor chart or I actually made these...put it on bookmarks, too. They know that the word difference is telling them they need to subtract. This is just a quick tool, a great resource for students in my classroom for solving word problem. It’s available, of course, on my Classroom Caboodle store. You can find it there.