Making Mental Images and Problem Solving in Math and

We have been learning all about Visualizing in Language Arts.  Readers often create images in their minds to help them understand stories.  We use our senses and think about what the words or pictures remind us of.  Yesterday, students listened to several poems and then chose the  a poem that created the most vivid image for them.  (Lots of children chose the cat poem!)  Then they drew a picture to show the image they had.  We learned that everyone's mental images are different because we have all had different experiences and we have different schema in our heads!  (See if your child can tell you what schema means.)

Today we listened to another poem ("Five Little Mice") and used our mental images (or visualizations) to create a dramatic interpretation.  Students worked in groups of 4 to act out them poem.

Mice crawling into the hole to escape the cat!

There were some very ferocious cats!

It was lots of fun to watch and see all the different interpretations the students came up with from listening to the same poem!  A yellow note was sent home today with suggestions about how you can help your child practice visualizing or making mental images when you read together.

We were solving an apple problem in Math today.  (There are 13 apples in a bag.  Some are red.  Some are yellow.  How many of each could there be?)
We first used real apples to solve the problem.  We sorted and counted how many red and yellow apples there were.

Students quickly realized there could be more than one way 13 apples in the bag, so we used 2 sided counters to "pretend" that the yellow side was a yellow apple and the red side was a red apple.  (See picture below.)

Another important part of this lesson was to figure out a way to show our thinking on paper. 

This picture shows a student sorting the 2-sided counters to represent the yellow and red apples.

We showed our thinking by drawing pictures, using numbers and words.

There were 6 red apples and 7 yellow apples in the bag!




You can try problems like this at home!  Here is an example:  There are 15 people at a party.  Some are girls and some are boys.  How many of each could there be?  Draw a picture to show your thinking.