As a math teacher, teaching reading and writing is a bit of a stretch for me. I like many others grew up when subjects were taught separately, so combining math with reading and writing was not common. However, in 21st Century Education it is important that the subjects overlap so students see the importance of how each of the subjects blend together and rely on the other subjects. My Discrete Math students are currently completely a college financing project where they are applying math of finances to a particular situation after they read and do research on three different colleges.
One of the hardest areas in math to teach is word problems. Students do fine with math symbols, but when students have to translate words into math symbols they often freeze up. There were lots of great tools posted on our classes site, but I wanted to find a tool that would specifically help with students with solving word problems. I came across WolframAlpha which I have used for math classes before, but there is a new feature. In addition to solving symbolic math problems, it can now solve word problems. Here is one example for algebra. The more elementary examples have visuals that would be helpful with younger students. It cannot do every problem that is typed in, but it would give students a tool that shows the equations in words and symbols to give them more examples of word problems.
News articles often include numbers within the story. A way I could incorporate reading and writing into math class is have students read an article, for example here is a story from TeenTribune from the Smithsonian. Within this article there are many numbers describing self-flying taxis. Students could be given a word problem based off the article for example, “How many times would a self-flying taxi need to stop to travel 120 miles.” This would be a multi-step problem where students would need to read through the story, choose the needed information, create a strategy to solve the problem, then actually solve the problem.
This is just a couple of ways I can incorporate tools for reading and writing into my math courses.
WolframAlpha
Michelle,
ReplyDeleteWolfram Alpha does a great job of supporting both math and literacy. I like your idea for using it to support word problem computations.
Your idea for TeenTribune is good but rather than give students a word problem to solve you might ask students to create a problem that can be solve with the information from the article. Students could work with a partner and exchange problems they develop. Both students must agree with the solution to the problems they create.
Dr. Dell