One O’Clock, Two O'Clock, Three O’Clock, Matemáticas!
By Jill Robbins

This month’s theme is connecting math content to language learning. As usual, our best resource is you – so we asked our readers how you integrate math content into your language classes. Here are some of your ideas:

Survey Says…
A teacher of beginning Spanish write that students "compose surveys based upon the content (how many students like baseball, basketball, swimming, etc.). When we are learning the numbers I give them math problems in Spanish and they have to write them down and give the correct answer to get the points."

Bears Galore in Germany
Lucia in Germany writes that "I teach kindergarten Spanish FLES. We name the numbers in the target language of course (we can count to 40 by now). We also name the shapes. Beyond that, we use manipulatives such as small plastic bears to see the quantities that the numbers represent (cinco bears = 5), we perform math operations such as addition and subtraction (tres osos rojos + siete osos verdes = ? osos), we sort a certain number of bears by color, we use the bears to make patterns (dos rojos, un azul y tres amarillos - repeat the pattern cinco veces)and we count by 10 using groups of 10 bears of different colors. We use the shapes to describe our world (we compared two pigs and a student told me that one was more "ovalo" and the other more "circulo")I use the shapes to explain how to draw something; I taped a different shape on each table and when I send students to a certain table, I determine the table by naming the shape and the color (John, sientate in la mesa con el triangulo cafe por favor)."

French Schedules
Telling time is a common way to teach the numbers in language classes. One teacher wrote, "Just last week we were learning to tell time and developed a survey of questions such as:

• A quelle heure arrives-tu a l'école?
• A quelle heure manges-tu le petit déjeuner?
• A quelle heure te couches-tu? and so on.

Students in class than polled each other and using an excel program created a variety of interesting graphs to share their information."

Watch out for low-flying tomatoes!
Have you heard of the Tomato Festival in Spain? Here's a great math tie-in with that: "According to the Realidades level one Spanish text, the Fiesta de la Tomatina in Bunnol, Spain is a 2-hour long tomato-throwing food fight using more than 130 tons of tomatoes. I asked my students to calculate how many classrooms like ours (22'W x 33'L x 9'H) filled with tomatoes would approximate 130 tons of tomatoes. We assumed a standard tomato to be 3" dia., 1/4 pound. We then determined that 1 cubic foot = 64 tomatoes / 4 tom. per pound = 16 pounds. Next, we multiplied 22x33x9 room dimensions =6,534 cubic feet x 16 pounds per cubic foot = 104,544 pounds of tomatoes to fill one classroom. 130 tons, or, 260,000 pounds / 104,544 pounds = 2.487 classrooms. I showed how the approx. answer could be found by changing 260,000 / 104,544 ( a hard div. problem) to 260 / 104, or better, 26 / 10 = approx. 2 1/2 classrooms full of tomatoes. We related this to going to the cafeteria and having 2 1/2 classrooms full of tomatoes delivered for a great food fight. My 7th grade class stayed involved in solving the puzzle and enjoyed doing this."

Mayans and Euros?
Bethe, a Spanish teacher in Annapolis, teaches Mayan mathematics to her 7th grade students. She says, "The 8th graders have been tracking the euro rate throughout the year and work on a variety of conversion problems as warm ups. It has really helped the students with the larger numbers and offered a foundation for basic economic conversations. Students receive "play" euro bills for their tests, quizzes, and projects. At the end of the year, we plan on having an auction to get students to bid on simple Spanish trinkets - using their larger numbers. It has been a fun and motivating way to get students to use the larger numbers."

Finally, a teacher claimed, "I do it all the time! Students laugh about that: I use +, -, = and other signs to explain simple grammatical rules."

Get in on the conversation by answering this month’s question here: http://nclrc.org/month_question.html

Polling Place
In our poll, we asked for the elements of mathematics content that teachers integrate with language lessons, and found that the largest number of teachers instruct how to say the numbers in the target language. The next most popular responses were telling time, working story problems, and counting syllables in poetry. Some teachers talk about geometric shapes, using money, and the use of periods and commas for decimals. See the poll results here: http://nclrc.org/month_poll.html

See our "For Your Classroom" column for more examples and resources that will help you to design your own lessons to integrate math and language learning.

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