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  • Life Skills Math – Not So Easy

    As I wrote previously, shopping is dense with math tasks as are grocery stores. Here are some division situations that are sneaky challenging and require a student to know when and why to divide before even reaching for the calculator. I will use these to help illustrate the fact that life skills math is not…

  • Authentic Work Experience

    Very clever activity implemented by the teacher who runs the Life Skills program at our school. She created envelopes (below) for each teacher. The envelopes do not contain any content but are used for practice sorting mail for the students in the program. The students in the program sort and deliver them to our mailbox.…

  • Sausage Fractions – Real Life Example

    Sausage Fractions – Real Life Example

    I have 3 kids and was cooking sausage for them. There were 5 sausage links available (below). How do I give each the same amount? Fractions! Each child gets a full sausage link. I then cut  the remaining 2 sausage links into 3 parts, 1 for each child. 1/3 of a link.   Each child…

  • Opportunities for Parents to Engage Students with Math

    Opportunities for Parents to Engage Students with Math

    Math is often considered an esoteric set of information that is disjointed from the reality people face, aside perhaps from money. Sadly, in school, especially in older grade levels, math is indeed presented this way. A situation as simple as riding an elevator provides opportunities to show and engage a student with math applied in…

  • Snow Math

    Here’s a common word problem used for linear functions and equations (y=mx+b): There are 6 inches of snow on the ground. Snow is falling at a rate of 2 inches per hour. Write a linear equation showing total snow as a function of time (in hours). The equation would be y=2x + 6. Often the…

  • Corresponding Angles in Stain Glass

    Found this (above) cool example of corresponding angles (see photo below for explanation). This window photo could be a nice introduction to this type of problem by printing it out on paper and having students match angles as the teacher shows the photo on the Smart Board or screen.

  • Application for Trigonometry

    Making math meaningful and maybe interesting is a challenge. The photo above refers to a real life application for triangles and trigonometry (see photo below) that is found in a news story about Russian jets and a US destroyer. The jet was flying at an altitude of 100 yards and within 200 yards of the…

  • Unit Rates

    Real life applications in of themselves will not make a concept real for many if not most students with special needs. They likely need the concept broken down into more concrete form (CRA). For this problem I would fudge the numbers and have 42 oz at $6 (7 oz per dollar) and a 5 oz…