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Curiotide

Write Math Word Problems Around Your Child's Obsession

  • Ages 5-7
  • Ages 8-9
  • Ages 10-12
Illustration of plus, minus, and equals signs on a spiral notepad, on green waves

Word problems about trains fail for a child who does not care about trains. The maths is unchanged if the trains become guinea pigs, and the resistance often disappears with them.

Ages 5 to 12

Time 5 minutes to make, 15 to do

You'll need Paper, and a chatbot on your account

How it goes

  1. Name the exact skill, not the topic. “Subtraction with regrouping across a zero,” not “subtraction.” Precision here changes everything about what comes back.
  2. Name the obsession. Guinea pigs, Minecraft, the local football team.
  3. Ask for six problems using the prompt below.
  4. Work every single one yourself before your child sees it. This step is not optional; see below.
  5. Give them four, not six. Two get held back for Friday.
  6. Ask your child to write the seventh for you to solve. Writing a problem needs more understanding than solving one.

The prompt

My 9-year-old needs practice with subtraction that requires regrouping across a zero, for example 305 minus 168. Write six word problems using guinea pigs and a pet shop. Vary the sentence structure so they are not all the same shape. Give the answers separately. Do not include any other kind of subtraction.

What a good result looks like

All six problems should require the target skill and nothing else. For regrouping across a zero, every subtraction needs a zero in the tens column: 305 minus 168, 402 minus 137. If two of the six are 340 minus 120, they are filler.

The sentence shapes should vary. Three problems that all read “the shop had X, sold Y, how many left” teach the pattern rather than the maths. Look for at least one comparison, one missing-start problem, and one with the numbers in an unhelpful order.

Check it before you use it

  • Do the arithmetic yourself. Chatbots produce wrong answers to their own word problems with complete confidence, and a child marked wrong when they were right does real damage. This is the most important check in this whole category.
  • Does each problem use the target skill? Models slip in easier variants.
  • Do the numbers make sense? A pet shop with 4,000 guinea pigs distracts everyone.

Keep the human part

Watching your child work out which operation to use is the actual assessment. The problems are just the excuse to sit next to them while they think.

If it is not working

If your child solves them all instantly, the skill was already secure and the diagnosis was wrong. Move to the next thing rather than generating twelve more.

If they can do bare calculations but not the word problems, the barrier is reading rather than arithmetic. Read the problems aloud to them and see whether the difficulty disappears. If it does, that is a reading intervention, not a maths one, and treating it as maths will make things worse.

One thing to watch

Six problems, not twenty. The point is diagnosis and a bit of practice, not volume.

Related: math help that explains instead of answering covers why the arithmetic goes wrong, and turn mistakes into a practice plan is what to do with the ones they miss.

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