Fish Word Problems

We have been learning how to solve a variety of addition and subtraction problems. One of our lessons was to solve fish word problems. When solving word problems, one of our strategies is to draw pictures. First we read the word problems together as a class and the students decided which numbers they wanted to insert into the blanks in the word problems. Because the students could choose their own numbers, each problem was unique. The students then drew the pictures to match the numbers in their word problems. For addition, they were able to use the strategy of counting all of the pictures to identify the number sentence and answer with label. For the subtraction problem, they had to use the strategy of crossing out the pictures, or fish, that were subtracted and then count what was left to identify the number sentence nad answer with label. The students then worked in small groups to solve one another's word problems.