Description

by Kristi Youmans

Add Critical Thinking to your students’ 21st Century Skill Set!

These 48 task cards provide an introduction to higher-level thinking and that keep students on task with challenging activities.

If you have enjoyed using the first set of Problem Solver Thinker Cards for grades 3-5 with Logic, Patterns, and Combinations problems, you are sure to enjoy using Problem Solver Thinker Cards – Math for students in grades 3-5. In this set of cards, you will find word problems that require students to solve with the strategies of Working Backwards, Guess and Check, and Algebra. These thinker cards are great to extend learning for students, to challenge students in stations or centers, and to allow students the autonomy of checking their work for the correct answers and getting hints for solving them when they are off track. Students will be practicing valuable problem-solving strategies which will
prepare them for end-of-grade tests as they will demonstrate the Common Core Mathematical Practices:

1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
4. Model with mathematics.
5. Use appropriate tools strategically.
6. Attend to precision.
7. Look for and make use of structure.
8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

Your students will love solving these problems individually, in pairs, or in groups. In each problem-solving strategy, the problems get increasingly more challenging, and students can master the strategies by starting simple and moving toward the more complex. I hope you will find these cards as useful in your classroom as I do in mine!

Do one problem as a whole class and then place the cards in learning centers for anchor activities or use as a team game, scoring a point for each problem answered first and/or correctly by the teams.

Some problems may be difficult for younger students to read independently or to solve, so teachers might want to read those problems to students and work through the problems together or in pairs. However difficult the problems may be, these problems are great motivators to start thinking critically for even the youngest students.

Each Problem card has two problems. Cut the cards in half. Laminate and put on a ring or in a folder. Each Answer card has two answers. Cut the cards, and laminate them and put on a ring or in a folder.

Students read the problem on the laminated card and solve it on notebook or other paper. They can then retrieve the answer card, check themselves, and rework problems that need correction.

Sample Pages
ps thinker cards 3-5 math – sample cards.pdf