Help! My dyslexic son is in 4th grade math and is having terrible trouble with word problems. He can add and subtract just fine, and even read the problem, he just can’t figure out when to add/subtract. Any suggestions how to explain this? I’ve tried to draw out the problem and it’s not working.
An example of the word problems:
On Thurs. Emil earned $6.50 dog-walking. On Sat. he earned $15.75 raking. That brought his earnings for the week to $34.50. How much had he earned before Thursday?
Any suggestions on how to help him understand?
Okay, that is a *hard* problem… PERIOD. My college kiddos would have to wrestle with it — it’s really an algebra problem!
YOu pretty much have to turn it into a chart with monday tuesday wed… Sat and the “total for the week. ” Fill in the parts you know. A critical question is whether he would know to subtract if he knew he had the amount of a part of something, and the amount of all of somthing and had to find the “missing part.” This is an important subtraction concept that lots of teachers totally miss — they’re hooked on “subtraction is take away.” Subtraction is also “difference.” It’s not that hard to grasp (but still takes a little time when it’s new) — if this bag of cookies has 10 in it and this one has 8, what’s the difference? (then have him come up with examples of that “difference” idea.)
The key to word problems IMHO is figuring out “what do you know” in “math language” and getting it written down that way so you can work with it with all those things you can with numbers.