Mathematics is a practical and exciting subject that can become easy to learn and understand if taught in a practical manner. However, students struggle to connect math to the real world, so including real-world math strategies in teaching techniques is essential for effective teaching. Math in the real world strategies help teachers introduce and familiarize students with practical applications of math concepts, enabling them to understand math better. In this article, we have brought for you ten real-world math strategies teachers can use to help students understand math concepts practically.
10 Math In The Real World:
- 10 Math In The Real World:
- 1. Make A Math Wall
- 2. Conduct Math Experiments
- 3. Recreate a Real-Time Scenario
- 4. Telling Time Through Sun's Shadow
- 5. Work Math With A Cooking Recipe
- 6. Take A Trip To The Grocery Store
- 7. Creating Halloween Candy Wraps
- 8. Gardening
- 9. Balancing The Cheque Book
- 10. Calculating Distances
1. Make A Math Wall
One great way to incorporate real-world math strategies is to start by making a math wall. Teachers can ask students to bring different items and write three ways these items can connect to math. They can guide students in this activity to find different objects in relation to mathematical concepts.
Teachers can create a classroom’s real-world math wall and it will encourage students to think and establish links between math concepts and the real world. Playing cards, cake pans, softball scorecards, and cookie recipes are some things that students can bring to school.
Using these, students perform this activity by playing cards, and they can learn patterns and about shapes, sizes, and much more with cake pans.
2. Conduct Math Experiments
Conducting various experiments in the school will help them practically understand math in real time. To establish an understanding of math with a real world strategy can be to ask students to conduct an audit of the water levels at school.
The amount of water the school uses daily can be calculated through this experiment. These will involve addition, subtraction, averages, and measurements related to liquids, like the flow rate of all the water fountains, toilets, and urinals.
They should be encouraged to find all the tasks places where water is used in the school. They should determine how much water the cafeteria dishwasher needs or can ask related school staff how much water is used daily when sweeping the floors.
Students can also propose suggestions for ways the school can conserve water, such as using rainwater gathered in a barrel that can also be used to water plants and washing paint brushes in a bucket instead of running water or much more.
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Through this real world strategy, students can identify how mathematical concepts like rates, percentages, can be applied in their surroundings. Teachers can also ask the students to calculate the percentage of marks they’ve scored in all semesters. This will help them use mathematical operations and understand the concept of percentages.
3. Recreate a Real-Time Scenario
One classic real-world math strategy you can introduce in your classroom is to infuse real-time scenarios. Fractions with pizza or teaching negative and positive integers with money are real-world math strategies you can use in your math classroom.
Teachers can recreate a restaurant scenario with students, play games involving all possible mathematical concepts, and let students solve them with practical examples. In this way, students will discover math to be more engaging and quickly pick it up.
Students can recreate a pizza restaurant in the classroom and sell various sizes at different prices, and this will help them understand money and quantity and much more.
The teacher can bring a cake and ask the students questions like how many pieces shall it be cut into so that all ten students must get two pieces or if the cake has ten pieces for ten students and three students didn’t take their pieces, how many will be left?
4. Telling Time Through Sun’s Shadow
Students in various grades can also be introduced to math during their history lessons. Example – While learning about the Eiffel tower, they can also learn about the French mathematician’s name marked on the Eiffel Tower.
The teacher can ask them to create a list of names mentioned there and write about them after reading their biographies. Teachers can also teach students the art of telling time using the sun’s shadow like in ancient times.
5. Work Math With A Cooking Recipe
One of the best real-world math strategies for teachers is making students understand the use of math in cooking. Teachers can ask students to work on different recipes and observe how math is essential while cooking. For instance, half or doubling a recipe is a great example.
Students learn to apply the concepts of ratio and proportions to determine the right measure for each ingredient. A teacher can ask the students to bring the ingredients to the class and guide them to use proper measurement tools to measure the quantity to prepare the food. These examples show how cooking can be a real-world math strategy for students to learn math.
6. Take A Trip To The Grocery Store
The role of math in grocery stores while shopping can be a fantastic, real-world math strategy to learn math. Teachers can make students understand how math is linked to the real world.
When students utilize math in buying products or goods in grocery shops, they must decide which item is discounted and which offers more quantity at less price. They will also realize that seeking the perfect deal on grocery items requires mathematical calculations.
This will help them know how to calculate savings. This math ability is very beneficial since it allows us to determine discounts to buy something at the most competitive rate. The buying price is determined using percentages plus addition, and the amount of money owed would then be determined using reduction. This way, students can also understand how mathematical calculations and concepts such as percentages are helpful in the real world.
7. Creating Halloween Candy Wraps
In this real-world math strategy, teachers can ask students to make graphs showing their preferred candies from various brands. Young students may create life-size candy bar charts by outlining the x- and y-axes on the floor with adhesive tape and using the chocolate as bars.
Older students can make tally charts and sheet graphs and observe which brands of chocolates are expensive or are more significant in size/quantity. For instance, the graph shows the price of chocolates increasing or decreasing regardless of size.
8. Gardening
Through this strategy, teachers can make students realize that mathematics applies to gardening. Students understand that they must use numbers, whether they count seeds, measure soil & seed depth, or how much water is required for planting.
Through this strategy, teachers can make students realize that mathematics applies to gardening. Through landscaping, teachers can make students understand that determining the floor space area of a square or rectangular land requires multiplying the length by the width. Also, they will understand the importance of units used to measure quantities.
9. Balancing The Cheque Book
It is one of the best real-world math strategies for math teachers to make students understand the use of math in managing accounts. Students can learn that financing and math go hand-in-hand. Teachers can ask the students to help their parents balance expenses and savings for a particular month.
They can start by totaling all monthly debit and credit card purchases and comparing the results with the financial statements. Students can also check how much they’ve already paid in tuition fees and how much more(remaining) is to be paid next semester. In this way, students also can understand that financing and math go hand-in-hand.
10. Calculating Distances
Teachers can ask students to calculate the distance and time when traveling or riding a bicycle back home, which can help students think about math concepts such as time and distance. Students can measure and share the distance they traveled from their homes to the school and figure out who lives closest and farthest from the school, and this will help them understand the concept of time and distance easily.
Also Read: 10 Personalized Learning Strategies To Implement In Class
Takeaway
Therefore, these ten real-world math strategies are great for making students understand how math concepts are related to the real world. Students can easily understand the applications and utility of mathematics through these real-world math strategies. If you are looking for some more student engagement strategies for your middle school math classroom.
These real-life math strategies are easy to explain, and the things required to explain these are readily available. This will help your students relate math to their everyday life and create curiosity about the solution to the given math problem. Use these strategies with your students in your next math class and see them enjoying solving challenging math problems
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