Kindergarten Word Problems Worksheets
This is one of those topics that if your teaching progression is paced correctly can be a piece of cake. This takes a few years of revising your unit planning and pacing, but if you make sure to cover all the skills before you get to this stage, it will be review. You should include story-based problems in all of your units. It gives math a purpose for students, and they will put forth a great effort, trust me on that one. The best way to approach this is to have your students begin to look for keywords in the sentences that would lead them to understand what operations are necessary for them. This series of worksheets and lessons helps introduce students to the concept of a word problem with simple adding or subtracting found within it.
Aligned Standard: Kindergarten - K.OA.2
- Step-by-step Lesson- Sugar packets and candy canes help us understand word problems with visuals.
- Guided Lesson Work - We use pictures to help explain the problems students see. This one involves turtles and place values.
- Guided Lesson Explanation - You see how to cross out when doing subtraction problems.
- Visual Addition Word Problems Worksheet - These problems all focus on sums.
- Visual Subtraction Word Problems - Day care, favorite books , and the soccer trip are all here.
- Word Problems That You Draw Up - This helps guide students draw the problems that they read.
- Match Math Equations to Pictures- This is the first step in getting students to think critically about word problems. Many teachers find it helpful.
- Simple Kindergarten Word Problems- These problems lay the foundation for all word problems. There are many different pictures to work off of.
- Answer Keys - These are for all the unlocked materials above.
- Cookie Word Problems Lesson- Cookies become a really problem for more than a cookie jar.
- Cube Word Problems Worksheet - You can make these into your own word problems as an alternate assignment.
- Addition and Subtraction Word Problems Guided Lesson- Complete with explanation. You can count this as an activity worksheet.
- Match Equations Worksheet- A great activity is to have students write these as word based sentences.
- Pizza Addition Word Problem Lesson- Add Tom and Jerry's pizza slices.
- Snail Subtraction Word Problems Lesson- We walk you into word problems very slowly. At snail's pace.
- Visual Addition Word Problems Worksheet- You start out with the pictures to help you along.
- Visual Subtraction Word Problems Worksheet- Maxine is about to shew a few mice away from her restaurant.
What Types of Word Problems Do You See in Kindergarten?
Kindergarten students only deal with problems that involve addition and subtraction. However, teachers try to add creativity to the problems. In some instances, students learn the relationship of numbers before they go for solving the problem. Let us discuss the concept in the form of an example.
Claudia put ______ fish food flakes in the fish tank before she goes to school, and _____ few more when she got back home. How many flakes did she put in total?
Now, in this problem, the students have the leisure to fill the gaps with numbers of their choice. After the students choose the numbers of their choice, the solution of the question is adding those two numbers. Now, let us consider another example.
Addison had ______ pieces of mangoes in her bowl. She ate some while doing her homework. Now, there are _____ pieces of mangoes left in her bowl. How many pieces did she eat?
In this question, students can once again add numbers of their choice. However, here Addison had more pieces of mangoes, and she reduced them after she ate some of them. Here, the students need to be careful in choosing their numbers. The first number should be greater than the second number.
Strategies for Helping Kindergarteners with Math Word Problems
The first thing that students often have difficulty with, at this level, is to understand it is a math problem. If there are no numbers present or they are written word form this will often confuse and even overload a few students. You should start with problems that help build them up emotionally. Make the problems clearly display the values that are to be considered. The next step is to help students learn to identify words or phrases that would indicate the type of operations that they will need to process in order to make sense of this problem. Since we are working with addition and subtraction, we should be looking for the words and phrases that would help us understand which of those operations are at work. For addition we might look for: altogether, combined, increase, and more than. For subtraction we would look for words or phrases such as: fewer, decrease, take away, less than, or difference. The last strategy which I feel has a huge impact on motivation levels of students is to make the math real for students. Put them in a scenario which relates to their everyday life, nothing that you need to introduce them to.