Since the 1800s, students have gone to school with the thought of learning reading, writing, and arithmetic individually, but recently have been able to learn them concurrently. How is this so? By combining changes in the classroom environment, instructional methods, technology, and methods of assessment, teachers are beginning to find more and more ways of integrating literature and mathematics together in the classroom.
Prior to integrating literature in mathematics class, the traditional math lesson involved the teacher explaining math examples in the classroom with students taking notes and regurgitating the same procedure on homework problems (Shults, 2008). By using this method, students never had to read the textbook, so long as they paid attention in class. Also, some teachers make exams exactly like their practice / homework problems. If I am challenged very little in my class and am earning good grades, what is my incentive to do anymore than is required?
To increase a student’s interest in becoming more familiar with the mathematical content being taught, teachers can develop a classroom environment conducive to an increased interest in learning more about the content. One method in which this can be done is through ‘word walls’ (Shults, 2008). A word wall is created by posting vocabulary words on the classroom walls and can be helpful in improving a student’s knowledge and pronunciation of the words. If a student is not reading the textbook provided for a mathematics class, these word walls can help to give the student inadvertent knowledge of the content being learned. Another method of changing a classroom environment to encourage reading can be achieved by developing a classroom library (Shults,...
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...th their classmates. An example of a real-life story may include saving for college tuition, total payment for a house/car at a certain leasing/mortgage rate, or calculating a life insurance premium rate based on a given mortality table. For all of these examples, exponential functions, order of operations, and/or summation could be taught.
Developments in technology have also created many more opportunities of integrating literature in the mathematics classroom. The Internet, SmartBoards, and computers allow for documents, articles, newspapers, videos, audios, and other multimedia sources to be broadcast in a classroom. This allows teachers to use multiple resources in a lesson (Shults, 2008).
Works Cited
http://www.ericdigests.org/2004-3/math.html
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/teachersatwork/1305/
http://www.ericdigests.org/2000-1/math.html
For this assignment, I completed a survey to assess my school’s literacy program by using a survey that was adapted from by Patty, Maschoff, & Ransom (1996) to analyze the instructional program and the school’s infrastructure. To be able to answer my survey, I needed to go colleagues of mine in the English Department and to my administration to help with these questions. Being a math teacher, we hardly ever discuss the literacy and the students’ acquisition of it in our department meeting during staff development days. Since I am not truly current with literacy acquisition in education, I am hoping to understand more from this process so I can help all my students. I want them to be able to read texts related to math and find information that will be useful to them during the year.
The teaching strategy focuses on the student’s engagement to create reading with meaning. This reading strategy allows students to have more freedom to make their own decisions in what they read and how they read, without the teacher forcing materials upon them. As well, more time is allotted during the school day for students to engage in reading activities, instead of using traditional methods of writing paper and answering questions on a worksheet after reading a book. The Daily Five teaching strategy also strongly develops oral communication skills within students and their peers. By doing so, it creates a sense of community in the classroom that traditional teaching methods did not have. This teaching strategy allows the student to question the material they are reading, which includes their interests, ability to comprehend, and understanding vocabulary. Through the Daily Five teaching strategy, students are also able to find books that interests them, without the teacher giving them group of “leveled” books students may not personally
Behrens, Laurence, and Leonard J. Rosen, eds. Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. 7th ed. NewYork: Longman, 2000.
Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Tenth edition. Edited by Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. New York: Longman Publishers, pp. 371-377, 2008.
Interactive textbooks that have youtube clips and wifi interfacing are innovations that will help students. Promethean boards, white boards, and smart boards will allow class interactions and research-based lessons for students. The use of ipads and tablets will cut the cost of textbooks and other materials. Teachers must be educated on the proper use of audiovisual arts in order to stay current. I intend to implement staff development and mentoring in order for us teachers to make reference more inligned with the way the new generation of students learn.
Literacy is an important issue in education. It is vital that students of all ages demonstrate the skills of reading, writing, and communication. Curriculums across the state of New Jersey as well as through out parts of the United States push for ways of including literacy processes in every content area. Administrators and school officials see written and oral communication as abilities students should utilize in their social studies, science, and mathematics classrooms, not just in language arts, English, and foreign language. In order to expand the literacy of all pupils, school curriculums now include journals, essay examinations, timed writing, response questions, and open-ended questions across all subjects. Math teachers must now grade open-ended questions, science students write in journals detailing their experiences in laboratory work, while teachers of United States history lean towards essay tests in contrast to the multiple-choice exams of the past. Essays provide numerous benefits for both students and teachers. They enhance literacy and sharpen writing skills in many ways. For a truly enriched and engaging curriculum, every teacher must include essay and/or open-ended assessments.
Church’s class plays a vital role in the student’s learning. Everything that surrounds the students on the walls has to do with subject matter and student learning. In the rear of the classroom, the whole wall is an interactive wall where the morning lessons take place. On the wall there is a calendar and a weatherboard in which the students write on with dry erase marker. Every school day the students go through the days of the week; they also talk about the weather each day. Likewise, in the classroom, there is a word wall that includes the spelling language for the week, the alphabet, punctuation and sentence structure posters. Students depend on the word wall to help them with writing. I have noticed students looking at the word wall to get ideas and information to be an effective writer. The classroom setting is great in Mrs. Church’s classroom, and I love how the setting is intertwined with the
This study was conducted in hopes of increasing academic performance in a core English class with my Literacy Extension students. The students in this classroom were diverse and required extra support in reading and writing. Due to the different strengths each student held in learning, it was difficult to have one method to teach the skills that were needed for their english Core class. Rheingold et al (2013) understood that “there is no single strategy or tool that provides the answer to effective instruction”, but they believed academic notebooks (interactive notebook) are a key resource for supporting a diverse classroom. I believed that the use of interactive notebooks would help bridge the gap of skills needed for their core class. Plus,
Looking back over the course of the semester, I feel that I learned many new and interesting uses for technology within the classroom – both for classrooms that have a lot of technology and for classrooms that are limited with technology. For the majority of the class, we utilized William Kists’ book The Socially Networked Classroom: Teaching in the New Media Age (2010), which provided multiple modes of instruction that both utilized and/or created technology. One of the first things that I remember, and consequently that stuck with me through the course’s entirety, is that individuals must treat everything as a text. Even a garden is a text. The statement made me change the way that I traditionally viewed Language Arts both as a student and as a teacher, as I very narrowly saw literature and works of the like as texts only; however, by considering nearly anything as a text, one can analyze, study, and even expand his/her knowledge. Kist (2010) states that society is “experiencing a vast transformation of the way we “read” and “write,” and a broadening of the way we conceptualize “literacy” (p. 2). In order to begin to experience and learn with the modern classroom and technologically advanced students, individuals must begin to see new things as literature and analyze those things in a similar manner.
Prior to this course, I was blessed with the opportunity to pursue a better understanding of the importance of incorporating literacy into all content areas. Being a math teacher, I was very reluctant about the topic. When I noticed this class in my required courses list, I was really wondering how can i teach reaching in my math classes. I knew that the only time my students really read is while completing certain word problems or taking notes; however, what I quickly learned was that my interpretation of reading or literacy, was sadly mistaken. What those professional development opportunities taught me, and what the course reading has reiterated is reading or literacy not only deals with reading words, but also correlates with analyzing, interpreting, and comprehending graphs and charts (Richardson, Morgan & Fleener, 2012). In the topic of mathematics, we encounter such materials on a daily basis, and just as Richardson, Morgan and Fleener (2012) stated, the math language and text are a completely unique style of language that must be taught.
In the content area in Language Arts, students will develop the reading skills necessary for word recognition, comprehension, interpretation, analysis, and evaluation of print and non-print text activating prior knowledge, processing and acquiring new vocabulary, organizing information, understanding visual representations, self-monitoring, and reflecting. This can be accomplished by implementing pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading strategies into the lesson plan. Fifth grade students will read and write a variety of texts with greater scope and depth. In addition, they will analyze and evaluate information and ideas by revisiting and refining concepts about the language arts benchmark and will become more refined and independent learners.
Investigating a Correlation Between Mathematics and English Literature Scores Aim: To be able to The aim of my investigation is to find out if there is any correlation. between individual’s scores in GCSE Mathematics and English. Literature. The. Also, I aim to find out whether the correlation is.
The importance of a content textbook, especially mathematics, is phenomenal. Some teachers often regard the textbook as the sole resource for their class instruction. However, they fail to question or analyze the textbook contents’ bias or perspective, whether linguistic, cultural, or political (Darvin, 2007). By analyzing textbook content, teachers can organize and sort the material by prioritizing the information to be learned and highlighting the most important instruction that will be addressed (Strahan & Herlihy, 1985). One of the most important components of any textbook is its academic language. Through analysis, the text’s academic language should be highlighted and studied to determine whether or not it coincides with students’ reading level or how it influences students’ work. In addition, by analyzing textbooks based on their academic language, the researcher gains a perspective to how the language will help increase students’ literacy skills.
Booker, G. & Bond, D. & Sparrow, L. & Swan, P. (2010) Teaching Primary Mathematics 4th Ed. Pearson, French Forest, NSW.
...orary texts: moving my English class to the computer lab: using technology as their medium, teachers can guide students through important comprehension processes while making meaning of traditional texts." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy no. 7: 543. Literature Resource Center, EBSCOhost (accessed May 5, 2014).