Language arts can be weaved into Math to disrupt the disconnection between the subject areas, encourage interdisciplinarity, and to improve students understanding of Math.
Why Integrate Math & Language Arts?
Resources:
Picture Books
Why is it Effective?
- Books allow students to create connections- making math meaningful and relevant to their lives.
- Math children’s books are a powerful vehicle for demonstrating to children that math is all around us!
- Children’s books can provide a context for various math concepts learned.
Applications:
- Mathical: Math is more than numbers and equations! The Mathical Annual Book Prize and Resources seek to inspire children of all ages to see math in the world around them. Each book has a reading guide that includes both math-centric and narrative activities to start discussions and activities with one child, a handful of kids, or an entire classroom.
- Math for kids: Teaching real-world applications of math is a vital part of math education, that’s why we love math books for kids. Let them tell the math story, show the applications, and make the math come alive!
Math Journals
Why is it Effective?
Research (Benson-O’Connor, McDaniel, and Carr, 2019; Dacey, 2018; Kostos and Shin, 2010) shows that math journals:
- Could help students process their learning, make sense of their learning, and solidify their understanding.
- Can promote confidence. Each entry helps organize and clarify thinking processes for deciphering mathematical situations.
- Students begin to make connections across mathematical ideas.
- Assessment tool! Provides a window into students’ thinking, understandings, and misconceptions.
- Nonverbal and nontechnical expression with drawings or diagrams provides additional access to understanding content
- Journals foster growth in mathematical understanding and computation and allow students to make a deeper connection to math’s real-life applications in their own lives. Real-life connections provide a deeper understanding of the purpose of math concepts and skills.
- In their study of math journal usage with second-grade students, they determined the use of math journals increased mathematical thinking, increased student use of mathematical vocabulary, and improved assessment of students’ understanding of the concept.
How can teachers use math journals?
- Writing to make sense of a task.
- Informative writing to describe or explain.
- Argumentative writing to justify or critique.
- Creative writing to express fluency, flexibility, or to elaborate one’s thinking.
- Writing to reflect on your thinking (metacognition).
- Sharing solutions with other students by talking about or sharing journal entries can be less intimidating than impromptu explanations in front of the whole class.
- Discussions, either in pairs or in small groups, can introduce new ideas and encourage students to evaluate strategies—their own and those of others.
- Sharing requires students to use mathematical language correctly and precisely to communicate mathematical ideas effectively. This can help with accessibility by making strategies explicit.
If you want to know more:
Types of prompts to guide students’ math journals
- Reflective: Encourage students to think critically and reflect on what they are learning. An opportunity for students to synthesize their learning.
- Problem-Solving: Students are working through a mathematical problem and writing about the processes or strategies used.
- Topic Development: A record of how students’ learning has progressed on a given topic.
Math Task Cards
This blog brings many examples of math cards and how to use them in the classroom:
Number Talks
Why is it Effective?
- Research shows that when students rely on rote algorithms, they don’t really understand what they are doing or why.
- Develop students’ number sense- the ability to understand numbers and quantities, use numbers flexibly, and perform calculations mentally.
- Allows students another way to express mathematical understanding and problem-solving strategies.
- Builds confidence, number fluency, and helps learners recognize patterns between numbers, and understand the properties of numbers & operations.
What is a number talk?
- Daily, short, structured way for students to talk about math with their peers (10ish minutes).
- Teachers pose a problem and, using only mental math, students attempt to provide solutions. Students share strategies and listen and ask clarifying questions of one another.
- Students aren’t just looking for the answer, they are looking for multiple solutions (or multiple ways to arrive at the solution)!
- De-emphasis on speed and right answers and an added emphasis on process and communication.
Math Talk Prompts
This blog brings many examples of math talk prompts and describes the five steps to conduct a great conversation to use them in the classroom:
Word Problems
Why is it Effective?
- Word problems are a big part of the curriculum and thus students’ learning journey with math.
- Word problems are notoriously difficult, especially when challenging language obscures the intent of the question.
See how this teacher uses word problems in her classroom:
Guest post by Peer Tutor Tamara Jabboour and Ariane Faria dos Santos, October 2023.
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