What's Your Story?

One of the things Common Core is asking students to be able to do is create real life situations or problems that relate to a given expression. Here's an example from the 7th grade standards:

This is something that even teachers struggle with. I remember a professional development I went to early in my career where the District Math coach asked a group of middle school math teachers to create a situation that resulted in division of 2 fractions. Most had no concept of what the problem even meant. From that point on I made an effort every year to stress the meaning of the operations when looking at any problem. 

This year, I decided to make writing real life situations one of my classroom routines and called it "What's Your Story?" We're just getting in to our rational numbers unit, so I'll start soon (Right now I'm stressing number talks.)

I haven't decided yet how I'm going to manage this warm up: Paper or digital, individual or group, if digital what platform will I use? So I did a possible method with my advanced 7/8 class. I created 1 Google Sheets document to share and had the kids work in groups to write a story for 3 expressions. This is what one group came up with:

And this is is what the whole page looked like:

​My thoughts about the activity:

• Overall, I thought the activity went great. They had a little trouble thinking about a fraction divided by a fraction. Most groups were in a "cake" or "pizza" mind frame when it came to fractions, so thinking about separating 7/10 of a pizza into groups of 1/5 was difficult for them to comprehend. I prompted them to think about other areas of life we typically use fractions. Several students brought up cooking and other forms of measurement. This made the problem a bit more manageable.
• Before letting groups work on the document, they had to work on paper for about 10 minutes.
• I loved having all the kids working on the same document because they could see what other groups were working on and get inspiration if they were stuck.
• I had the groups set permissions for their group section so other groups couldn't change their slides on accident. However, when groups inserted a picture, it wasn't inserted into a cell...it was just placed on top of the sheet. This caused a little trouble when the picture covered another group's work. I reminded students that no one was doing anything malicious and to be patient while the problem was fixed.
• When I start doing this for a warm up I will need to shorten it a lot (this took a 60 minute period, so even if I only completed 1 problem it would take good 20 minutes. Most likely I will print out a document to go in notebooks.

​The final document can be found here.