Making Math Meaningful: Showing Kids How Math is Useful in the Real World

If you’ve been teaching long enough, you know about the pendulum-swinging phenomenon. You’ve seen the pendulum swing especially in literacy and math. In my district, the pendulum also swings between literacy and math. When math scores are down, all of our PD is focused on teaching and learning in math. After a few years of math, math, math, literacy scores drop. Then, predictably, all of our PD is focused on reading and writing instruction. At the time of writing this post, all of our staff meetings and professional development sessions are focused on numeracy - rich tasks, open-ended questions, parallel questions, attitudes to math (Growth Mindset), and so on.

Our math blocks increased from 1 period to 2 so I played around with a guided math format for a part of the year. Naturally, a few of my students asked, "Why are we doing so much math?" and "Why do we have to learn this?" And by ask, I mean whined! :( I definitely needed to change our attitudes towards math!

At the beginning of each unit I would try to explain its application to our daily lives. This helped a bit. Check out this article, Teaching Kids Why Math Matters.

This discussion led to the creation of posters to help connect math to everyday activities and occupations.

There are every day scenarios that involve math...