Teaching Kindergarten Children to Solve Word Problems

A kindergarten teacher's practice was investigated in order to understand her knowledge of her children's mathematical thinking, the ways in which she acquired that knowledge, and the uses she made of that knowledge in making instructional decisions. The focus of the investigation was the teacher's knowledge of her children's thinking about numbers, including counting and addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The teacher had attended Cognitively Guided Instruction workshops at which she had the opportunity to learn about research on children's mathematical thinking. She gathered information on her own children's thinking by posing word problems, listening to children as the described their strategies for solving the problems, and talking to other adults about her children. She used that information to select problems to pose in subsequent lessons.