The Book of the Month and Mathematics: An Integrative Approach

by Christy Rhoades

Learning mathematics for deep conceptual understanding is critical in preparing our students to face global competition in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) career areas. A dynamic, resourceful, and effective way to gain this profound insight is by exploring rich problems that lead to the essence of the solution while making important connections. Finding such problems that appeal to adolescent students while engaging them in critical thinking can pose an immense challenge to today’s math teacher. Working together, literacy and mathematics coaches can give some of the needed support with the development of “book-of-the-month” lessons, which can provide natural, culturally relevant, and effective backdrops in the creation of meaningful problem situations.

The Need for Using Innovative Approaches When Teaching Mathematics

Because research points to the necessity of reform in the way children learn mathematics, we no longer teach using solely direct instruction. Instead, relevant, in-depth, inquiry-based instructional methods are needed in order to ensure students internalize and, thus, retain important conceptual understandings and communicate them effectively. For that reason, collaboration between literacy and mathematics teachers to provide rich, engaging lessons that fuse content-specific pedagogy is advantageous (Draper, 2002).

Empowering All to Engage

According to West and Staub (2003), “unpacking the big mathematical ideas” into user-friendly concepts will allow students to attain flexible and robust understanding, and the mathematics coach must nurture teachers to increase their knowledge in the content-specific art of teaching. As a mathematics coach/intervention teacher in a large, urban district, it would seem I have a double challenge. Using the cognitive coaching model, I work in partnership with teachers to plan, reflect, and mediate self-directed efficacy while providing support with respect to content knowledge and methodology (Costa & Garmston, 2002). I must, by way of interactive, collegial discourse and modeling, reflect best practice within the mathematics classroom. In essence, I need to have a buy-in from teachers who may have used direct instruction, page by textbook page and worksheet after worksheet, for 30+ years, and I must provide insightful lessons that appeal to adolescent students within a context that is meaningful to them. This can be overwhelming, especially when still working on building a rapport with new staff and establishing myself as coach. Engaging teachers and students takes some brainstorming and experimentation.

Establishing Essential Connections While Integrating Mathematics and Literature

I stumbled upon a way to provide an outstanding springboard for lessons that would intrigue the students: bringing out the mathematics in the “book of the month.” In our district, the entire year’s worth of books of the month are selected and approved at the end of the previous academic year.  Since the books of the month were already chosen, I could work on building a rapport with teachers by inserting a lesson that correlated to something they were responsible for integrating into the curriculum anyway, and at the same time I could model a lesson to establish myself as a colleague who could be trusted (a difficult endeavor in an urban school where trust can be hard to come by). So I developed math lessons that were suited to all the grade bands (I worked with preK–6 students and staff at the time).

Early on in my experimentation with correlating mathematical concepts with the book of the month, I worked as a coach with a teacher in a first grade classroom. On one occasion, the book of the month chosen by the literacy coach was Salt in His Shoes by Deloris Jordan (2003), Michael Jordan’s mother. This delightful story told of young Michael Jordan, who wanted to play professional basketball when he grew up, but feared he would never be tall enough to do so. His mother told him that putting salt in his shoes would make him grow taller. However, when Michael did not grow taller as he expected, his father taught him that height was less important than hard work and determination. 

For this book, I developed a measurement activity where students used snap cube units to estimate each other’s height and then to estimate how tall Michael Jordan grew. The students were excited when they learned that they might actually find out how tall one of their favorite basketball stars was.  Since a snap cube was an inch in length, we had wonderful discussions about such concepts as how to convert inches to feet and whether to adjust our estimates. Once we had snapped all the cubes together and carefully stood them up to see just how tall Michael Jordan really was, we got a huge surprise!  Michael Jordan wasn’t very tall after all, or so it seemed. Was our result reasonable? Looking at the snapped cubes, the students judged that he would have been just taller than their teacher.  That couldn’t be right.  What happened?

We found out that the snap cubes were not quite an inch (not including the part that snaps), which really made a significant difference in the end. The lesson did not go the way I had hoped; in all honesty, it went better than expected! What rich discourse we had, and how we thought like mathematicians!  In order to find out how tall Michael Jordan really was, we were estimating, making conjectures, proving and disproving, adjusting conjectures, again proving and disproving, going back and revisiting what we knew and what we wanted to find, and even extending our reasoning (Mason, Burton, & Stacey, 1985).

When reflecting with the teacher, at first I thought she had lost trust in me since an unexpected turn in the lesson occurred, and I was unsure at the time that she saw the value in the process of finding a solution. We talked about how the students were so excited and caught up in finding the answer, perhaps due to how meaningful the answer was to them. All things considered, the teacher seemed more comfortable working with me and less threatened with the whole coaching idea; and later, we laughed about what happened. I mused to myself that if first grade students could become so engaged, imagine the possibilities with adolescent students.

I discovered support for my reflections in a study that probed the value of using literature as a contextual backdrop for mathematics lessons. Capraro and Capraro (2006) found that adolescent students who learned geometry concepts within the context of a story showed increased fluency with mathematical vocabulary, increased flexibility in the application of the concepts learned, more comprehensive explanations, and significantly better scores in pretests and post-tests versus those who did not. Since the results from the study showed statistically significant gains in students’ scores, using literature in this fashion, undoubtedly, implies best practice.

Providing Optimal Learning Opportunities in the Culturally Diverse Classroom

Our urban students particularly enjoy books that are multiculturally themed and filled with stories that capture the imagination. Furthermore, research supports the use of such material in the classroom—urban, suburban, or rural. Infusing culturally relevant literature into the curriculum provides opportunities for all students to become aware of a variety of cultures (Harris, 1993). According to Gollnick and Chinn (1998), successful teachers help students learn academics and skills in order to compete in the dominant workplace while valuing the ethnicity of students and communities in which they live. Kasten (2005) affirms that “mathematics must become less a filter and more a net—for gathering in all students. The traditionally underrepresented in mathematics must receive the kind of teaching that will help them succeed” (p. 9).

While learning about diverse cultures is essential in order to establish equitable classroom environments, for the adolescent student, peer group discussions that address issues such as bias and stereotypes are valuable lessons and should be part of the curriculum (Gollnick & Chinn, 1998). Furthermore, the roles that prior knowledge and personal history play are noteworthy when comprehending the language of mathematics (Kenney, Hancewicz, Heuer, Metsisto, & Tuttle 2005) and should become an underlying consideration when planning book–of-the-month lessons. A favorite of mine, Deborah Hopkinson’s Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt (with illustrations by James Ransome), provides the express milieu for such discourse that is in accordance with specific mathematical application.

Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt: Creating a Synergistic Learning Experience

Synergy, by definition, is “the interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects” (American Heritage, 2006). When a cross-curricular lesson is joined with opportunities to solve multiple, rich problems that are meaningful to students and the world at large, a synergistic learning experience occurs. The lesson "Finding the Best Path to Freedom for Clara and Jack," based on the story Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt, is a case in point.

Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt is about a young girl, Clara, who is taken from her mother and placed at a plantation to work in the cotton fields. She makes friends with a woman, referred as Aunt Rachel, who teaches her to sew. While Clara sews quilts, she listens carefully as others discuss the area that surrounds the plantation. Eventually, Clara sews a quilt that shows others how to escape from the plantation and connect up with the Underground Railroad to find their way to freedom.

The literacy coach offered several activities for teachers to use when introducing the book to their students, which involved thinking critically about the history of the Underground Railroad and about the dilemma of slaves in the nineteenth century. Working alongside the literacy coach, I developed a mathematics lesson that was especially compatible with these experiences. The mathematics I chose to insert made sense with the book’s focus, enriched the students’ language arts experience with the book, and was identified in our school’s data with a weak standard that needed instructional support beyond what the current curriculum afforded.

The seventh and eighth grade lesson developed to correspond with Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt involves the area of mathematics called discrete mathematics. Discrete mathematics, in very simplistic terms, involves tasks such as finding the best way to arrange objects, finding the best or shortest route, finding the most efficient way, and other possible applications (Rosenstein, n.d.). In this special case, the focus is the shortest path to freedom, which depends on certain scenarios given and extends to changing scenarios and using proportional reasoning to find so-called actual distances. Students are introduced to and begin to develop a conceptual understanding of this area of applied mathematics that is integral to understanding the world around them using higher-level reasoning within a context that carries great societal weight. Since emotions, cognition, and motivation play a substantial role in engaging students (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975; Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; as cited in Meyer & Turner, 2006), the essence of the mathematics within the lesson becomes spontaneous and uninhibited. 

Creating Synergistic Learning Experiences for Your Students

To get an idea of what a “synergistic” lesson might look like, see “Finding the Best Path to Freedom for Clara and Jack.” In addition, here are some ideas to think about when creating your own book-of-the-month and mathematics activities.

• Strive for collaboration between the literacy and math coaches, in addition to teachers, when deciding on what books of the month will be used.
• Use an interactive bulletin board to involve students in the book of the month. This is a fantastic way to engage students, especially when the bulletin board is located in high-traffic areas such as hallways and media centers. Use library book pockets to hold answers to problems posed on the bulletin board so that students can get immediate feedback. For example, the interactive bulletin board developed for Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein included problems where students were asked to find the fraction of rhyming words and put into decimal notation and equivalent percentage. Beside each problem was a pocket that hid a card with the answers written. Students could remove the card and check to see if their answers were correct, then replace the card
• Market the book of the month to get students and staff excited. Some of the marketing strategies we have used include special announcements, posters, and flyers—and at certain times, a staff member might dress like a character in the book.
• Provide a home connection with a mixture of short journal prompts, math situations, games, or other activities that correspond to the book of the month. These short activities can be placed in a calendar and sent home or handed out at family nights (or other after-school family functions) for family involvement.
• Keep current with data such as pretests and short-cycle assessments, and align book-of-the-month lessons and activities with standards, benchmarks, and indicators where weaknesses lie.
• Begin a contest between classes to see which class can score highest on book-of-the-month assessments.
• Share ideas at professional development sessions.

In Conclusion

Making the most out of mathematics lessons is vital in getting our students where they need to be by the time they reach the postsecondary level. Synergistic learning experiences that make the mathematics useful and meaningful are crucial in order to develop deep, conceptual understandings and, at the same time, provide opportunities for students to think critically about issues that affect them and their world. In my experience, integrating the book of the month with mathematics ideas makes mathematics exciting and not the traditional routine that too often stereotypes this all-important content area.

Suggested Reading

Bay-Williams, J., & Martinie, S. L. (2004). Math and literature, grades 6–8. Sausalito, CA: Math Solutions Publications.

References

The American Heritage dictionary of the English language (4th ed.).(2006). Synergy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Retrieved February 4, 2009, from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/synergy.

Capraro, R. M., & Capraro, M. M. (2006). Are you really going to read us a story? Learning geometry through children’s mathematics literature. Reading Psychology, 27, 21–36.

Costa, A. L., & Garmston, R. J. (2002). Cognitive coaching: A foundation for renaissance schools (pp. 35–54). Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon Publishers.

Draper, R. J. (2002). School mathematics reform, constructivism, and literacy: A case for literacy instruction in the reform-oriented math classroom. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 45(6), 520.

Gollnick, D. M., & Chinn, P. C. (1998). Multicultural education in a pluralistic society (5th ed., pp. 103–106). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.

Harris, V. J. (1993). Using multiethnic literature in the K–8 classroom (pp. 3, 4). Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon Publishers.

Hopkinson, D. (1993). Sweet Clara and the freedom quilt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Jordan, D. (2003). Salt in his shoes: Michael Jordan in pursuit of a dream. New York: Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing.

Kasten, M. (2005). Prompt intervention in mathematics education: An overview. In S. Wagner (Ed.). PRIME: Prompt intervention in mathematics education (p. 9). Columbus: Ohio Resource Center for Mathematics, Science, and Reading and Ohio Department of Education.

Kenney, J. M., Hancewicz, E., Heuer, L., Metsisto, D., & Tuttle, C. L. (2005). Literacy strategies for improving mathematics instruction (p. 23). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Mason, J., Burton, L, & Stacey, K. (1985). Thinking mathematically. Harlow, England: Addison-Wesley.

Meyer, D., & Turner, J. (2006). Re-conceptualizing emotion and motivation to learn in classroom contexts. Educational Psychology Review, 18, 377–378, 390.

Rosenstein, J. G. (n.d.). What is discrete mathematics anyway? Retrieved February 3, 2009, from http://mathforum.org/dmpow/dmwhatis.html.

Silverstein, S. (1974). Where the sidewalk ends: The poems and drawings of Shel Silverstein. New York: Harper & Row.

West, L., & Staub, F. (2003). Content-focused coaching: Transforming mathematics lessons (pp. 9–22). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann & Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh.

Christy Rhoades is a mathematics intervention teacher, working with students and providing PD for staff at Dayton Public Schools. Her past experience includes coaching K-8 math teachers and teaching grades 6 and 7 mathematics. She is a member of the ORC Mathematics Review Board and the Ohio Mathematics Education Leadership Council and has participated in numerous ODE committees. Christy received her undergraduate and two graduate degrees at Wright State.

Return to top