This year has been no exception and once again I watched my students take their NWEA math test and all but give up immediately upon seeing any problem that had more than three or four words in it. Some of the students do this out of pure laziness, but most do so out of fear and frustration. Once again it is time for me to combat this by making them face their fears and confront these dreaded word problems on a daily basis. Thus, the return of the daily math journal! I generally start these the second week of school and slowly build the students up until they're able to use the CER math graphic organizer to do a daily word problem on their own, but the new job kind of took over and I didn't get around to it until now.
I don't believe in reinventing the wheel (who has the time?), so I used a combination of resources to create this year's journal. Most of the resources were free downloads from various websites, but I also took from previous practice journals I'd made. This one is formatted to print as a "catalog" from Publisher: landscape format, back-to-back, resulting in four pages per sheet. I then take the papers, fold them in half, and staple them with my book stapler and a wallpaper cover (ask at paint stores for expired sample books, they generally give them to teachers for free and you can quickly cut the pages to measure 9 x 11.5). The students enjoy choosing their own covers and the books really do last for several months this way (my reading class is still using their sentence journals we made back in August).
I predict much whining, crying, and gnashing of teeth when I roll these journals out in a week or so (I need to finish WIDA testing first and can only take so much complaining at a time), but I know from past experience they'll work. We'll do the first week or so together and then they'll be expected to do them as part of their independent practice each day and a week's worth of work will count as a project grade. While I have yet to hear anyone declare the problems or journals as "fun" or their "favorite" part of my class, I have overheard students saying how "easy" word problems are after only a few weeks of this approach. Anything that gets them to admit that word problems can be "easy", or even actually make an attempt at them instead of just guessing at the answer, is well worth the time and effort to create and implement!