In case you are trying the MARS MAP Classroom Challenges for the first time, it is recommended that you read the Brief Guide for teachers and administrators before you get started.
Before the lesson, students work individually on a task designed to reveal their current levels of understanding. You review their scripts and write questions to help them improve their work.
In the lesson, students are asked to work collaboratively matching cards that contain symbols, cards that describe the structure of the situations and cards that contain word problems. This is done in two phases. After each phase there is a whole-class discussion that reflects on the structures that are being learned.
In a follow-up lesson, students use their learning and your questions to review their initial answers and to complete another task.
To help students to interpret the meaning of multiplication and division. Many students have a very limited understanding of these operations and only recognise them in terms of 'times' and 'share'. They find it hard to give any meaning to calculations that involve non-integers. This is one reason why they have difficulty when choosing the correct operation to perform when solving word problems.