Rationale
Several times I’ve heard from students “Why do I need to learn this?” or “I’m never going to use this again.” With my curriculum unit I plan on changing that attitude with everyday math usage. The unit I have prepared will focus on including both math and science in an integrated way to help my students use math when faced with everyday activities like building a container garden for our school. Our original garden is being torn up, due to some construction at our building, so that is why I’m choosing a container garden over a regular garden, but you are most definitely able to do this in a regular garden at your school. In the eight years that I’ve taught second grade, I’ve noticed that the math curriculum teaches the students addition first and then subtraction second. In my unit, I will teach students that addition and subtraction go together, in the context of living organisms of plants, I will create an understanding for my students. The reason I’m taking this approach of teaching both addition and subtraction at the same time is because kids need to know that the two have a relationship with each other. My students also need to know that a lot of word problems could be thought of as being about addition or about subtraction. It is the way that you approach the problem and how you solve it, and not the wording of the problem. There are no “magic words” to help solve the problem. The approach of integrating both math and science can include activities that they can use to help with feeding their families and the community around our school. We will be planting some vegetables and fruits that are very familiar to the students and some that they have never heard of or tried before.
My unit will be composed of two sections. The first section will contain a collection of word problems for the class to discuss, analyze, and solve. The second section will contain the actual hands-on gardening activities. The scenarios for my math problems will use real life gardening activities, to show my students that they can use math in different aspects of their lives. For example, using scenarios that they can actually manipulate can help all of my students, especially my English Language Learners. Keeping the same scenarios and just changing the numbers that we use in the problems will help students with their reading skills because they will be practicing the same words. Reading the same scenarios over and over again will help students recognize words that might have been too hard in a regular text that they are asked to read, but when put in a word problem that we will go over several times they will get used to those uncommon words. It will also help the students that need to do hands-on activities to keep them motivated in learning math. The article “Three Pillars of First Grade Mathematics, and Beyond” by Roger Howe explains the importance of presenting a well-rounded collection of situations where addition or subtraction can be used (1). I am also adding lots of books to use as read aloud to excite my students about this unit and just to read to them.
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