Keeping It Real

While our students certainly dedicate loads of time grappling with new mathematical concepts and mastering fundamental math algorithms and formulas, it's equally important that we provide them with opportunities to apply their knowledge and understanding of these skills utilizing real-life math scenarios. Designing learning experiences that require the application of mathematical concepts pushes learners to think deeper about math, allowing them to see the connections while offering meaningful context for their learning. As we often say in The Hive, "We're keeping it real". The goal of our math learning experiences is aimed at doing just that and this week's guest bloggers are excited to explain the value in it. Enjoy.

We've been learning a lot of new math concepts this year. It's important to know how to use the math in real life. For example, if I were a construction worker and I was expanding the size of a building to twice its area, I would have to multiply area (LxW) by two.      - @DollyParton101

Connecting math to the real world is important because our future jobs will depend on knowing how to use your math knowledge. For this week's math project, we had to use our understanding of how to multiply fractions so that we could expand the size of a pizzeria. This really helped me increase my understanding of fractions.   - @Rosita

This week's math project gave us an opportunity to connect math to the real world. We had to decide how many customers we wanted to fit inside a pizza restaurant and then decide how much bigger we would have to expand the restaurant in order to fit all of the customers inside. This had me thinking a lot about math and now I really understand how I might have to use fractions in the real world.    - @JuniorBean

Some kids are very skilled at math, but sometimes they don't always know how to use it in the real world. For example, if I invited thirty-six of my friends to my party and twelve said they couldn't come, how many would be attending my party? Speaking of parties... we just finished a math project where we had to expand the size of a pizza parlor. We were given measurements that included fractions and we had to multiply those numbers to be able to increase the size of the restaurant to twice the size. We really had to put some oomph into it! It was a lot of thinking about fractions and it was fun to see the results.    - @JaxIsBack