Writing Story Problems

If you think solving word problems is difficult, try writing them in a way that is appropriate to the lessons you are teaching.  We tried to engage the students by having them write “silly stories” where they invented their own word problems based on an equation.  Many satisfied the “silly” requirement but few wrote a story that actually fit the equation.  I was charged with editing some of the best stories, changing the numbers into a worksheet to create equations from the stories.  I struggled with the stories.  Given a story I can easily build an equation but creating a story from an equation is harder.  I think fundamentally I think symbolically and I need to practice more non symbolic ways of representing mathematics.