Story Problems with Make a Scene & Seesaw

Today in Mr. Anderson's first grade, we used Mrs. Bishop's idea to create some math stories, then load them to Seesaw but leave them UNSOLVED, so friends could get on, listen to the video, and then solve the problem on their own.  Since the first graders are working on addition and subtraction to 20, these are the parameters we set for their story problems.

We used the app Make a Scene: Christmas, but Mrs. Bishop used the app Superhero Comic Book Maker when she did this project with her kindergartners.  You could also use the app Draw & Tell. The benefit of using either the superhero or draw and tell app would be that the students could manipulate the stickers within the app (i.e. make their video more animated, remove items if they're subtracting, etc).  However ... it's Christmas and so we decided to use this Christmas app for today.  :)

The students created images in the app, then loaded to Seesaw and used the record while drawing feature to tell their math story.  They were to use the pen tool to annotate their drawing while talking, adding an equation and/or crossing out items if it was a subtraction problem.   The students were asked to post at least one addition and one subtraction problem.

Here are a couple of examples:

  

Here she wrote: there were 4 family members, and then 4 more came.  How many in all?

Here she wrote: there were 17 reindeer, and 4 ran away (so she circled those 4).  How many were left?

Here are some video examples: (click the links to view)

5-3

3+3

17-7

This project turned out great, and is a wonderful way for students to practice problem solving, both by writing the stories and by solving their friends' stories.  To solve them, we asked students to view their friends' folders and choose some story problems to view.  They could leave their answer in the comments area of their friends' posts.  Throughout the course of the 45 minutes they worked on this, they developed much better problems, and became skilled at using the "record while draw" tool within Seesaw.  I am excited to go back to Mr. A's room after Christmas and try this activity again, to build fluency in these problem solving abilities.