A proven strategy for helping fifth grade students successfully problem solve is to teach them the Fantastic Five strategy. The Fantastic Five not only provides a step-by-step process for problem solving, but it presents it in a format that makes it easy for students to remember. To teach the Fantastic Five have your students trace an outline of one of their hands. In each finger have your students write the steps to the Fantastic Five. The steps are to find out what the question is asking, highlight important information you can use to solve, eliminate useless information, solve the problem and check your answer for accuracy.
What seems to be the most logical step often can be the most difficult. Many word problems are just that: words. Students get lost in the jungle of extra information and by the end of the question, they have no idea what they are supposed to be doing. Teach your fifth grade students to look for two telltale signs, either a question mark at the end of a sentence or a sentence in which they are told to do something. Sometimes word problems do not ask a question, but rather command you to perform an action. Knowing what it is that you are supposed to be doing is the most important step in problem solving.
Recognizing the difference between what you need to know and what you don't is the next step in the Fantastic Five. Teach your students to circle, highlight, underline or star information that will help them solve the problem. Any extra information meant to distract your students should be eliminated by crossing out. Many word problems add extra information that is designed to make the problem more interesting, but ultimately makes solving the problem more difficult. Simplifying the problem by eliminating useless information and focusing on essential facts will make your students better problem solvers.
Throughout your students' educational career they have been introduced to a variety of strategies for solving math problems, such as guess and check, working backwards or drawing a picture. Many of these strategies only work on specific types of problems, so the ability to analyze a problem and choose the appropriate strategy to solve is the next step in the Fantastic Five. Once your students know what they are supposed to do and they have identified the information that will help them do it, have them choose a strategy and solve. Reinforce the idea that it is okay for your students to try more than one strategy.
The last step in the Fantastic Five is to check your answer and make sure it makes sense. Too often students will get an answer to a math problem and assume that it must be correct without checking to make sure it makes sense. For example, if you are working a problem that involves money and throughout the course of the problem you are spending money and the question asks how much money you have left after buying a certain amount of items, it would not make sense for you to have more money after buying x amount of items than you started with. Go back and check your work.