Restating Word Problems Using Words or Images

Visualizing Your Word Problem

The first step in solving word problems is to visualize them. If you can visualize your word problem, then you can better understand it. And if you can better understand your problem, then it will be easier to solve. Part of visualizing your problem is making sketches and writing notes of the important parts of the problem.

If you are a visual learner, once you can visually see a problem, then things start clicking and you can better solve your problem. This is what we are going to talk about in this video lesson. We are going to see how we can make sketches and write notes on our word problem to help us solve it.

We start with a word problem.

'John has six balloons that say 'congratulations' on them. Mary has ten balloons that also say 'congratulations' on them. Both John and Mary are going to a graduation party. They are bringing their balloons to the party. The host of the party already has two balloons that are ready. How many balloons total will there be at the party?'

Making Sketches

We only want to sketch the important parts of the problem that will help us answer our problem. So we have to first figure out what kind of an answer our problem wants. For our problem, the last sentence tells us that the problem wants us to find the total number of balloons. So that tells us that the important part of the problem deals with balloons. When we sketch, we want to focus on the balloons. Okay. So let's re-read the problem to see where the balloons come into play.

'John has six balloons.' Stop. John has six balloons, so we can go ahead and draw six balloons. We continue reading. 'They say 'congratulations' on them. Mary has ten balloons...' Stop. Mary has ten balloons. Okay, so we draw another ten balloons. Let's keep our six balloons in one group and our ten balloons in another group.

We keep reading: '...that also say 'congratulations' on them. Both John and Mary are going to a graduation party. They are bringing their balloons to the party. The host of the party already has two balloons...' Stop. The host already has two balloons. So we draw another group of balloons that only includes two balloons. We keep reading: '...that are ready. How many balloons total will there be at the party?' We are done reading. There were no more balloons to draw. We've sketched all the important parts of the problem.

Writing Notes

Now it's time to write our notes. We think about what our problem wants. It wants us to find the total. What mathematical operation will help us do that? Isn't it addition? So we can put plus signs in between our groups of balloons.