Connecting Math to real-life

    

It's a Real Life Math Linky! - The Teacher Studio
    


    Hi preservice educators, and welcome back to our mathtastic blog! Think about the last time you were in an elementary math classroom... this was probably a while ago, but do you remember how often you looked at a math problem and it related to your life? Did you ever have a class where you could relate? In our experience, there were not many opportunities for connecting. It was very surface level and used examples that could never connect to our real lives. However, it's so important for us as teachers to connect their experiences to our math learning. Expanding our curriculum and branching out to help students recognize that math is part of our every day lives is so important! 

    Knowing our students and their lived experiences will allow us to connect with them more in and out of the classroom. Depending on your grade level and the concepts you are teaching, there are so many different ways to incorporate real-life situations. For example, in fourth grade asking about money and where they find it, how they would use it or have seen it being used are easy ways to place math at the center of their world and it is realistic!

    Being able to center students and allow them to see themselves and their experiences of math will open up a whole world of opportunities for them and will lead to curiosity being the lead of learning instead of teachers talking and not relating the information back to students. We as teachers can do this!

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