Teach students to read and spell numbers. Make flash cards with the words for each number from zero to ten on one side and the digit on the other. Then make flash cards for twenty, thirty, forty, all the way to one hundred. Teach students to recognize the words for higher numbers. For example students should recognize that "twenty-three" is 23 in word form. Do the same for hundreds, thousands, millions and billions. Use these flash cards to help students practice recognizing numbers.
Teach students key words that help them know what math operations to perform in the problem. Words like "total" or "altogether" often mean the problem requires addition while words such as "change" or "difference" mean the student must subtract. There are words for multiplication and division as well. Make flash cards of these and help students practice recognizing these words. Have students highlight these important keywords when reading a word problem.
Teach students to locate the final question in a word problem. Often the final question will be the last sentence in the word problem, but not always. Teach students to look for the question mark and to verify that sentence is truly the final question. Sometimes having students re-write the question in their own words makes the final question more clear for them.
Teach students how to eliminate extra information that is not necessary for solving the problem. Have students look at each sentence and note whether or not it contains information relevant to the final question. Draw a line through extraneous sentences. For relevant sentences, have students look at each word and see if there are any words that can be eliminated. For example, "Thirteen 16 year-olds bought 5 pizzas that cost $12.99 each." If the final question is "How much did the group spend on pizza?" then the words "thirteen" and "16 year-olds" are irrelevant and can be eliminated to decrease confusion. Draw a line through these words.
Teach students to organize the information in the word problem. List the key words. List the known information. List the unknown information. Have students re-write the final question in their own words. Remember that the unknown information is not the same as the final question. For example, "Sam ran 28 miles during the last two weeks. How many miles did he run each day if he ran the same number of miles each day?" The missing information in this problem is the number of days in one week. The student must bring that knowledge with her when answering the question.