5 Ways to Expose Your Students to Math in Their World

5 Ways to Expose Your Students to Math in Their World

by WATstaff Tuesday

Your high school math teacher was right:  Math skills are essential. Jobs in art, archtecture, IT, engineering and science all require math skills. That's why, as teachers, we need to not only expose our students to math in math class, but also help them see how the concepts they’re being tested on apply to their world. Here are five easy ways to do that.


1. Let them create: Use The Geometer’s Sketchpad®, interactive smart tablets or just plain old white paper to allow your students to create geometric art with right triangles, hexagons and various angles. Then display their creations around your classroom to remind them that math and art go hand in hand. Need ideas?  Check out Sketch Exchange where math teachers everywhere share Sketchpad ideas and activities.

2. Let them tinker:  The world is filled with data sets—and not just official sets like census data. Using TinkerPlots® Dynamic Data Exploration, students can import their own data (ex. How many students are wearing blue today? What are their favorite movies?) and visually detect where trends emerge. In this way, they’re making sense of their world while building analytical skills.

3. Let them walk: Geometric properties abound in the physical world. Take your class for a walk around the neighborhood, noting the mathematical relationships seen in a building’s architecture and in nature. Have your students trace a shape using patty paper, then further explore its properties back in the classroom. 

4. Let them budget:  Giving your students a monthly “allowance.” Have them chart how much they will need to spend each week on food, rent, bills, and other expenses they propose. How much money will they have left to spend on entertainment and other non-essentials? The exercise will get them calculating numbers and percentages, while giving them a head start on life planning.

5. Let them design:  Collaborating with your students’ English teacher, have your students design and create books out of their poetry or essays—and take them through every step of page layout and book design, allowing them to explore measurements, margins, spacing and more.