Operational Vocabulary.

  Its the beginning of the school year and many teachers including myself begin with a review of vocabulary used to express various operations.  We ask students to change numerical sentences to written and vice versa.

Student success of this topic depends on two things.  First, students need the ability to understand the literal meaning of the sentence and they need the ability to write the same sentence mathematically.

It has been shown that students who struggle with reading often struggle with choosing the proper operation based on standard vocabulary.

One standard method used is to have students learn key words which works well many times but it is not always reliable.  One example is per.  The word per when used in this way - "Marty bought 25 pencils at $.15 per pencil" indicates multiplication while it means division when using it this way "Mary and her three friends shared 24 cookies.  How many cookies were there per person?" Yet, so many lessons only list per as multiplication or division.

I read one lesson plan which begins with passing out four index cards to each student to write four different math words which indicate an operation.  The teacher collects the words and writes them on the board.  Students have divided their pieces of paper into four quadrants with each quadrant labeled as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.  Students divide the words into four groups, each group representing an operation and write them on the paper, each word in its appropriate quadrant.

I think I'd take this a step further by having collecting the words, writing them on the board, have the students separate the words on a piece of paper but once all the students have completed this, ask them to walk around and check out other people's classifications.  After 5 or 10 minutes, it would be time to complete a class suggested four quadrant list of operations but each would have to provide justification for classifying the words. 

If a word has more than one possible operation such as "per", bring up context and how you would determine which operation should be done. What wording would provide a tip as to the operation indicated.

Once they have the words broken up into quadrants, give the students a word problem such as the difference of a number and eight is twelve and have them rewrite it into an addition problem such as twelve minus a number is eight.  I believe this will help students learn the relationships between addition and subtraction, multiplication and division.

If we teach students to use keywords to identify operation, we have to make sure they know which words could mean two different operations depending on context.  Too often teachers teach key words to represent only one operation rather than looking at the context of the keyword.  I'm getting ready to do this with one or two classes and I plan to bring up context.  I'll let you know how it goes. 

Have a great day and let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.