piseco said,

September 21, 2007 @ 4:41 pm

I don’t know of any game that does what you’re looking for, though I don’t have a copy of Peggy Kaye’s Games for Math on hand - there may be something in that book.

One easy (but maybe not so high on the fun scale) game would be simply to make a trivia-style game using word problems as the questions, and where the *answer* would be not the solution to the problem but the correct function you would need to use. That would simply require you to copy down / print out word problems from a variety of sources with the proper operation noted on the back of each one. The board or theme could be anything you like - any type of “collect the pieces” or “race to the end” board.

Another idea that pops to mind would require more work on your end, but you could tailor word problems so that if he chooses the wrong operation, there’s a silly response on the back (”Jamie miscalculated the number of bottles, and cut her hand trying to make the .62 part of a bottle! Move back three spaces.”).

Or, what about this? You could make a bunch of word problem cards each with a character (like a collectible card game in feel) or an object as the card’s title - the people or objects featuring in the word problem. Each card would have a point value, maybe chosen by you depending on how hard you think it is to figure out what operation to use?

Then, each person playing (you and your 12 yo) would get a hand of maybe 12 of these cards, and the timer gets set for maybe 5 minutes. (You’d have to play a few times to get the right hand size and time limit to make the game hard but doable.) Each player has to split their characters into four teams: one for each operation, trying to get each card on the correct team. You could have a big mat in the middle of the playing area with the four operation symbols on it, and each player lays the cards down in front of the operation they believe matches the problem on that card.

When the timer goes off, each operation is revealed, one by one. On the backs of the cards there will be a small symbol for the correct operation. Only cards that have the + symbol on the back count for the addition team - then you add the points on your addition team and the team with the greatest total wins the addition battle. Resolve the battles for each operation and find a winner.

This could be tweaked to fit whatever theme or current interest your 12 yo has…

Meg said,

September 22, 2007 @ 3:27 am

I don’t have a game suggestion, but Girl also struggled with this for a lot longer than I thought she should.

I finally had her start the problem by underlining the words that she thought told her what operations needed to be done. Then we’d discuss her word choices and what they meant. It helped her focus on what the statements were saying for instructions and not get distracted thinking about ‘they should get a real job.’

Once she started connecting common words to operations, she had a system to approach the problems.

tribeofautodidacts said,

September 22, 2007 @ 6:40 am

It looks like you’ve gotten some terrific suggestions! I don’t really have anything to add.

With my kids, I try to keep their understanding of math concepts ahead of their computation ability (the opposite of the schools’ approach.) For example, we talk about “real life” questions or story problems, and I encourage them to figure out *how* to solve it (for example, “you have to divide.”) I tell them not to worry about *how* to solve it yet (for example, if the child doesn’t know how to do long division yet). Understanding *how it works* is more important.

Miranda said,

September 23, 2007 @ 1:27 pm

Not a game, but a little trick that I use when I’m confronted by a problem that I can’t quite conceptualize. I reduce the numbers to ridiculously small ones that I can visualize and manipulate easily in my head, and work out the answer. Then I tease apart the relationship between the easy starting numbers and the solution to figure out what I’ve done intuitively and put what I’ve learned back into the original problem. For instance, taking your example above. You could instead pencil in alternate numbers and read your ds the problem as follows:

“Jamie wants to buy a toy car. Every time he collects a bottle he earns 2 cents. The car costs 6 cents. How many bottles will he have to collect to make enough money to buy the car?”

… he’d probably say “three” without hesitation. If that’s indeed his response, you then say “You’re brilliant! Now, what operation fits with what you did in your head?” If he doesn’t know, you can prompt him with “Start with six and two. What operation on those numbers gives you an answer of three? Are the six and the two added, subtracted, multiplied or divided to get three?”

Once he’s recognized that he intuitively divided the numbers, go back to the original problem and use division. Obviously he’ll have to deal with the remainder, or the fraction or decimal, and figure out what to do with that. (You can’t collect 0.6 of a bottle and make three cents.) But it sounds like he’s struggling with coming up with the initial conceptualization of the problem, and I wonder if simplifying the numbers and solving might help him with that.