Description
Writing Activities to Enhance Middle School Mathematics
Math the Write Way offers a venue for introducing writing into the mathematics classroom. Although the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics advocates writing in the mathematics environment, little more than story problems are presented in the way of writing in most classes. Research repeatedly demonstrates the potential benefits of writing in the mathematics classroom: many types of writing activities improve student achievement.
Math the Write Way provides a variety of ready-to-use, easily implemented, motivating activities to engage students in writing in the math classroom.
It provides content-specific writing activities, vocabulary activities, quick writes, generic writing activities to be used at any time throughout the year, and numerous ideas in each chapter that can be reused or reshaped to fit any middle school mathematics curriculum. Activities involve:
* Whole Numbers & Decimals
* Fractions & Number Theory
* Integers & Rational Numbers
* Expressions & Equations
* Ratio, Proportion & Percent
* Geometry & Measurement
* Statistics & Probability, and Data
* Analysis & Statistics
Use writing on a regular basis in your classroom to enhance student learning and reinforce mathematical concepts.
Sample Pages
CLC0447C.pdf
CLC0447B.pdf
CLC0447A.pdf
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The book’s chapters (after the initial generic overview) each focus on a typical area in middle school math. For instance, some chapter titles are “Fractions & Number Theory,” “Statistics and Probability,” and “Ratio, Proportion & Percent.” The last few chapters provide guidance on and examples of assessments and rubrics, as well as other Internet and print resources on using writing effectively in the math classroom. As the author points out, the writing prompts I have seen in the past tend to be very general or difficult to find on the topic I am teaching at any particular time. So, the format in this book of grouping the writing and vocabulary activities by topic will be quite helpful to me as I integrate writing more effectively in my classroom.
I plan to use a few of these activities this year as a start, in order to have my current students get the benefit of these writing activities, as well as to “get my feet wet” to see how I can integrate this writing into my already full curriculum. One of the possible advantages of these kinds of teaching approaches is that they may be helpful for my ESOL students as well as my other general and high achiever students, since graphic organizers are provided throughout the book. I notice the “Quick Writes” writing prompts in each chapter appear to be varying levels of difficulty, so I will try assigning different prompts to different level students, and making other prompts available to all to select ones they would prefer to discuss in writing. As an extension to writing, I will also have students discuss some of these prompts in group discussion, in order to better develop lower-skilled students’ thinking and to give all students an opportunity to practice verbalizing their math knowledge.