Featured Topic: Mathematical Poetry
Celebrate National Poetry Month by challenging students to write poems about mathematical concepts and terms. You may choose to read some of Greg Tang's books to introduce this topic or choose some examples from the resources below as examples of students' work.
- Read examples of student Poetry Patterns written by students in Ms. Sweeney's classroom, Glazer Elementary School, Detroit, Michigan. Use Cinquain Directions to help students write original math cinquains.
- Apply your writer's talent to the Geometry Meets Poetry webquest. Be sure to check out the Student Poems written for this webquest.
- Use Shape Poems to help younger students learn these geometric terms.
- NCTM's Illumination lesson, Shapes and Poetry, uses Shel Silverstein's "Shapes" poem to encourage students to write their own shape poems for a class collection.
- Older students may enjoy creating Poetry in Math Puzzles to test their classmates' deductive skills.
Additional Math-Poetry Resources
You Can, Toucan, Math: Word Problem-Solving Fun
David Adler, a former math teacher, uses rhyme to pose math word problems requiring students to figure out if they must add, subtract, multiply or divide to find the correct answer. Extend this book by challenging students to write their own "poetic word problems."
Earth Day Math Activities
- Scholastic's Math Hunt: Earth Day challenges students to use environmental facts to solve math problems involving numerical operations, fractions, decimals and ratio/proportions.
- Googol Learning's Earth Day! Take Your Math Outdoors! has lots of suggestions for real-life, hands-on explorations of math and nature including the Fibonacci sequence, symmetry, geometric shapes, estimating distances, etc.
- Cleaning up for Earth Day encourages student teams to carefully clean the playground and examine the different kinds of garbage they found. Student teams might construct a graph to demonstrate their results.
- Earth Day Trash Survey requires students to collect data on the trash they pick up on the playground or some other school project. Students use this data to construct a survey.
- Consult Dive into Earth Day Activity Ideas for students involved in cleaning beach areas.
- Earth Day Math Problems present environmental facts and require students to use these facts to solve the word problems.
- See more Earth Day Math Activities.
Earth Day Math-Literature Connections
Earth Day -- Hooray!
Stuart J. Murphy incorporates place value into Earth Day cleanup and recycling activities in this Mathstart, Level 3 book. Use the book as a jumpstart for your Earth Day investigations.
Math Manipulatives Series: Investigating Dominoes
The second installment of this series is now online. Math Manipulatives: Investigating Dominoes is a one-stop resource for dominoes that includes games, math-literature connections, problem solving, templates and links to additional online resources to help students use dominoes to develop number sense. Be sure to check out the Domino Fun section at the bottom of this page to view some amazing Domino Art and to master a domino trick that will astound your students!
- View the Investigating Dominoes collection.
- View the Investigating Tangrams collection.
Recent Additions to Mathwire.com
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About Mathwire.com
Mathwire.com is designed to provide activities and appropriate worksheets for teachers to use in their classrooms.   All activities and worksheets support the constructivist approach to learning mathematics and the NCTM Standards.
Activities:   The activities on this site were developed by Terry Kawas and the teachers in districts where she has worked as a math consultant and coach or with students she has taught in college math-methods courses.   The activities are classroom-tested by teachers and appropriate modifications have been made to reflect this field-testing.   These activities are posted online in an effort to share quality activities and routines within the mathematics community.
Terms of Use:   Teachers are welcome to download any of the activities for free use in their classrooms.   No activities may be copied for use on other websites or included in commercial products without permission in writing from Terry Kawas, webmaster.   Contact Terry Kawas