by Tiffany Liles

Created on: November 20, 2008

Teaching math to students of any age can be difficult. Relating the math to something fun or simple or interesting can make then lesson relevant. Making the lesson relevant is the key to begin learning.

The first relationship I try with older kids is generally to money. For a preteen through a high school senior they are preoccupied with material things and generally understand processes better if they are about money. Positive and negative numbers can be taught with money. Algebraic relationships can be about money and shopping which is a plus for relevance. Percentages go well with money too.

If money is not working, and for younger kids it may not because the concept of having and paying has not really linked yet, try food. Using foods to relate math to kids is great. It provides three tiers for learning, audible, visual and kinesthetic. I have used small personal pizza for fractions. We've cut slices and related them to the whole. We've divided with pizza in groups, with each group having a different number of people. The great thing about this is that you can use cardboard pizza and get almost as good an effect. I've also used apples and oranges too.

To teach degrees in a circle I use skateboarding or snowboarding. You can buy the little skateboards for pretty cheap and let the kids "finger skate" around your desks. Its fun for them but it's even better when they start realizing a full circle is 360 degrees plus a half circle more is a 540. I can also use snowboarding and skate boarding to figure slope.

We've built things to scale using blueprints that kids have made themselves to teach scale. One of my favorite builds was the catapult build. The kids had to build a small scale model of a catapult then calculate the throwing force using the weight of a water balloon and the distance it traveled. Again, fun, teamwork, using your hands to build and oh yeah there's some math in there too.

I've used a make shift game of battleship to teach the correct way to grid using only positive numbers and no letters. Most of the kids think that I am giving them the day off until they start figuring coordinates. Football and basketball statistics are fun for predicting and percentages. It also helps that you teach them about odds and they think they are gambling. One year we broke down the 64 basketball teams in the March Madness NCAA championship. We used predictors like past championships, win/loss ratios to predict the winner. The class did pretty well.

Basically a trend is developing, relevance to real life and fun is the only way to get a child's interest. You can tell them where they might use the math or that they will needs it to do certain jobs, but in the end the average kids lacks the ability to see or plan for their future, to them it's all about the right now. To take their math skills to the next level investigate the world and bring some real life examples to the lessons.

Learn more about this author, Tiffany Liles.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.