Maths Across The Curriculum - English

All teachers are now under pressure to include some elements of basic English and Maths across all subjects. Let me be clear here - this is not about improving spelling or reading within the maths scheme of work. My aim on this section of blog is to give some ideas to actually team teach for a few lessons, giving equal space to, in this case, English and Maths.



Idea #1

Debating Maths

This is great for a mixed class - or one where you have students who often say things like "what is the point in doing this?" "when will I use this?"

Debate Questions:

Is maths useful when you leave school?
Is maths the most important subject at school?
Is maths fun?

I'm eager to hear of any other ideas, but the first one is what I will be leading with. By giving the students time in English to learn about persuasive argumentative writing, allowing them to research and find out themselves exactly why maths is important, can not only lead to good collaboration between subjects, but will hopefully encourage them to find all the reasons why maths rocks.


Idea #2

A new education minister has decided that Maths will be scrapped from the curriculum as it was his least favourite subject. By using examples of real life applications of maths learnt in school, write a formal letter to the minister against the plans.

Idea #3 - could link in to Food Tech as well

For a cook book, explain with clear instructions how to chance the recipe ingredients for4 people to 6 people, or to 10 people, or to n people. It should be clear enough for anyone to understand. With an example.

Idea #4

Pick a persuasive argument that can be backed up by statistics, Chelsea are the best team in Europe, One Direction are better than the Beatles, Films with female heroes are worse than male heroes. Hollister is overpriced for it's market, Beats headphones are selling faster than Dr.Dre's music etc. The school is getting better because grades are getting better etc..
In the Maths lessons, find and analyse data, understand data representation. In English, create a presentation, letter or whatever to highlight the statistics.

Idea #5

Maths fun with English language

Pick two or three novels, pick a sample page in each. What is the average word length on these pages? What average is better to use? Does Charles Dickens write more, longer words than JK Rowling? is their a difference because of the market audience?
How many similes in a chapter? How many uses of adverbs etc.
What about lengths of books, does that have an effect on popularity? If you wanted to write a classic novel, what length should it be?
Just for a bit more fun - Classics Vs Modern, UK v US, who uses the letter z more often? and so on.....

Idea #6

It's a bit obvious, but writing a newspaper article from the point of a mathematical discovery - or just
about a revelation on how to answer fractions.

 

 

 

But then again, who reads newspapers now anyway?

 

 

Why not some successive tweets from Pythagoras, or a facebook profile etc...

 

Idea #7

 

My colleague @MissArcherMaths ran a cross curricular activity with English involving promoting their own supermarket chain. They included offers and promotions and linked it to their presentation.

The Yr7s loved it - they had their own stalls and I played the Inspector, grilling them about their supermarket offers.

 

 

As usual - please fill me in with any ideas you might use to link the subjects together.