Hello and welcome to Problem Solving Strategies, Number Two: Act it Out or Use Tokens
In this video you'll learn how you can act out a problem, or use tokens like toys or
school supplies to help you solve word problems.
Word problems that are tricky to solve are often easier to figure out
if you use problem solving strategies.
In the first video, we saw how important it is to pay attention to clue or key words
in order to figure out which operations to use.
If you have not yet watched that video, go back and see it now.
Another strategy you can use, in addition to what you learned in the first video, is to
act out, or model, the word problems using real objects.
Sometimes you can use the objects described in the word problem, but when you don't have
those handy you can use other objects to represent them.
Let's look at some examples to better understand what I mean.
Here is a word problem:
"There are 10 coins in Linda's wallet.
Her sister finds 3 coins on the sidewalk and gives them to Linda.
How many coins does Linda have altogether?"
So, how will we solve this problem?
We know that the problem asks us to add.
How do we know this?
Yes.
The clue word "altogether" tells us that.
Remember that strategy from Problem Solving Strategy 1, in Video 1?
We can easily add the two numbers together,
but we can also solve the problem by acting it out or modeling using real objects.
I can use 10 coins to show how many coins are in Linda's wallet.
Linda's sister gave her 3 coins that she found.
So if we add them together, we have a total of 13 coins.
We just solved this problem by acting it out.
In other words, we modeled the solution by using actual coins,
just like acting out the real problem.
Let's look at a problem where you can't represent the objects in the problem with real objects.
I'll show you what I mean.
"Sandy owns 9 hats.
Her sister owns double the amount of hats that Sandy owns.
How many hats does Sandy's sister own?"
Depending on where you are when you solve this problem,
you probably do not have many hats to use or act out this solution.
Sometimes a problem gives you objects that are difficult to act out,
like cars in a parking lot,
or the many books in the library,
or the hundreds of shoes in a shoe store.
Does this mean that we cannot act out or model the problem?
No.
In fact, we can model the problem.
What we can do is use tokens or other objects to represent the objects in the problem.
In our problem, we may not have many hats, but we can use these tokens to represent,
or stand in the place of, hats.
Here is what I mean.
If we make each token be a hat,
how many tokens would we need to show how many hats Sandy owns?
That's right, 9.
9 hats equals 9 tokens.
Now, if Sandy's sister has double this, what does this mean?
You're right again.
It means 2 times this, or the same set added again, or twice.
How many in all?
That makes 18 tokens.
But really, since they represent hats, that makes 18 hats that Sandy's sister owns.
Wow.
She sure owns a lot of hats.
And there you have it.
You learned to solve word problems by
acting out the problems with the actual object, or modeling using tokens.
Practice this strategy with our word problem games.
When you get stuck, find objects or tokens and act out the problem.
Thanks for watching and always be clever.