Porsche Chun

Artifact 1 CUBES
Standard #8 Instructional Strategies. The teacher understands and uses a variety of
instructional strategies to encourage learners to develop deep understanding of content
areas and their connections, and to build skills to apply knowledge in meaningful ways.

I chose to use the CUBES strategy as evidence to show my understanding of

instructional strategies. In my student teaching classroom the fourth grade teachers had
to create an SLO. They decided to choose multi-step word problems as their SLO. One

problem that we saw when students tried to solve the multi-step word problems was that
they were having difficulty with reading comprehension or understanding what the
problem was asking them to do. The students did not understand what the problem was
asking them to do and they in return just used all the numbers to add, subtract, multiply,
or divide. Therefore, I introduced the CUBES strategy to the entire fourth grade as a
strategy to implement in the classroom in order to meet their SLO. I created these posters
for each classroom, so students could refer back to it if needed. Each letter in CUBES
stands for a specific strategy. C stands for circle the numbers and common sense. One of
my students decided to add in common sense for the C because students need to think
about if how they are solving their problem actually makes sense. The U stands for
underline the question. B stands for box the clues. E stands for evaluate how to solve the
problem. S stands for solve and check your work.
Every time students receive a word problem they should be using the CUBES
strategy in order to help them organize their ideas and solve the word problem. This
allows students to develop a deep understanding of word problems. Therefore, I believe
that I demonstrated an understanding of standard #8, instructional strategies. The
CUBES strategy is a stepping-stone for students to build upon the knowledge that they
already have. I believe that this strategy could be implemented into any grade level and I
hope to implement it into my own classroom in the near future.