Math Current Events

“Our students live in a world where current events swirl around them unceasingly. . .When current events are included in math instruction, students become aware of the ever-present relationship of math to the world around them.”  – Laney Sammons

Teaching our children to make mathematical connections to the world around them helps them to build understanding and increases their interest in math.  One way to help students make math-to-world connections is through the exploration of current evens.  Our students are immersed in media, and when we include it in our math instruction, math becomes relevant and more meaningful.

There is plenty of math in the media and here are just a few ways to use it:

• The upcoming election offers many math opportunities.  Following polls, holding class elections, graphing votes, comparing the candidates’ positions on issues using Venn diagrams, graphing Electoral College info, and tallying the number of political ads that are seen in a day or week are just a few ideas.  These two websites offer quite a bit of kid-friendly election info:

http://election.scholastic.com/

http://www.timeforkids.com/minisite/election-2016

• Track the hurricane’s path and create a calendar to show how it developed over time.  Check out this link:  http://www.dogonews.com/2016/10/10/hurricane-matthew-leaves-a-trail-of-destruction-all-the-way-from-haiti-to-north-carolina

• Computation-Finding the average – Find 10 car ads.  Find the average cost of a car.

• Look for an article that has some type of graph and discuss what it shows.

• Sports articles are great for comparing numbers.  Tournament brackets offer opportunities to make predictions and check results.

• Scavenger Hunt – Find numbers in the news.  Find the sum of all the numbers, arrange them from least to greatest, or create a bar graph of numbers with 1-digit, 2-digit, 3-digit, etc.

• Check the weather.  See how many ways math is used in reporting the weather.

• Guess-timate – Give students an article.  Count the number of words in the first 5 lines.  Then estimate how many words are in the article.

• Check the grocery ads.  Provide students with a budget and have them plan a meal for a family of four.

• Have students find articles that use math and create a bulletin board sharing them.

Through the exploration of multi-media and current events, teachers share real-life mathematics and problem solving opportunities. Students begin to make connections and see that math is a valuable part of their every day lives.  Mathematical reasoning and logic are used when playing a game or creating a puzzle, patterns are everywhere in time and space, and geometric shapes surround us.  Measurement is an active part of all designs, computation is needed to balance accounts, and we round up when estimating the cost of the objects we toss into our grocery baskets.  These math-to-world connections become personal and have relevance as students see that math does count!

“The real value is connecting what kids do in math and science to a bigger world.”  – Eric Spina