Hello Everyone,
Please forgive the lengthy delay between posts. Today, I will finally be discussing a few examples of how to integrate social studies and science content into mathematics.
The best way to accomplish this integration is through contextualization of the mathematics problems. Rather than asking students to solve problems that rely solely on numbers, mathematics teachers of all grade levels should present problems in context, so students are working with “real” numbers. Students begin working mathematically by counting physical objects, then gradually move to working abstract problems. The concreteness of learning to count needs to extend to the abstract computations through contextualization.
For example,
- Rather than converting 218 feet to its equivalence in inches, students could find how tall the Statue of Liberty is in inches, given that she is approximately 305 feet tall from the ground to the tip of the torch (National Park Service, 2014, para. 2).
- Rather than working with contrived proportions, students could examine a chart of how tall a sunflower grows in a certain number of days and use that information to predict its growth on a specific day in the future.
- Rather than converting MMXC into regular numbers, students could decipher the date on the Statute of Liberty’s tablet: JULY IV MDCCLXXVI (National Park Service, para. 26).
- Rather than simply subtracting two four digit numbers, students could determine how long the passenger pigeon has been extinct, since “2014 marks the centenary of this extraordinary extinction” (Project Passenger Pigeon, 2012, para. 2). Incidentally, this problem incorporates English language arts because students will need the definition of “centenary.”
Enthusiastically,
Ms. Tyler
References:
Project Passenger Pigeon. (2012). Explore this amazing bird and its message. Retrieved from: http://passengerpigeon.org/
National Park Service. (2014). Statue statistics. Retrieved from: http://home.nps.gov/stli/historyculture/statue-statistics.htm