2013 Conference Proceedings - University of Nevada, Las Vegas

I've not used children's literature to teach math, but I have used books before with my 6thgraders, and I agree with others in the class that this is a fantastic way to get studentsexcited about a topic. My students would sit (or lay) on the floor while we read andlooked at the pictures -- wonderful! I am thinking of doing the type of activity we didtoday using the Sir Cumference (Neuschwander, 1999) book during our "Tiger Time,"which is a half-hour period used for various subjects.Another indication of the impact of children’s literature with the participants comes from theteachers' choice of professional articles to read during the course. For an assignment, participantswere to select a geometry related article (from June 2010-present) to read and critique fromNCTM’s Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School. Three teachers of the 18 participantschose Geometry Sleuthing in Literature (Wallace, Evans, & Stein, 2011), where the authorsdescribe ways in which to incorporate multiple works of fiction into lessons. Brianna’scomments in her review summed up how the use of literature in the grant class has changed heropinion about literature in the mathematics classroom.My thoughts after reading this article made me realize the importance of literature inMath. It also showed me another way to reach my students when introducing Geometryconcepts to them. This topic was also displayed on Friday in my current math class by theteacher reading to the class and having the students to work out the problem of the story.This was very exciting to me…I will implement more reading of literature involvingmath concepts and terms to build a better vocabulary and perspective of math…Theseliteratures will be used and discussed in my future classes when Geometry is beingtaught.DiscussionThe findings from daily reflections and journal article reviews suggest utilizing children’sliterature in a professional development geometry class positively impacted inservice teachers’beliefs about the importance of fiction in their mathematics classrooms. This open-mindedattitude towards reading across the curriculum could be due to the fact that almost all teachersdeclared in background surveys their standards-based teaching philosophies that included the useof cooperative learning groups and manipulatives in the classroom. Also, a majority of theteachers already had used children’s literature as a means of teaching, which could have played arole in their opinions about literature use.Proceedings of the 40 th Annual Meeting of the Research Council on Mathematics Learning 2013 130