Math + Community Service = Learning
September 30, 2009 | Posted in: Class Updates
Curious as to why students were asked to bring in canned goods when school began? Besides being a valuable community service activity to support Gifts of Love, the canned goods allowed us to address an important skill: sorting and classifying. This skill often poses a challenge for kids who must sort items into different categories and explain their logic. We practice it at different points throughout the year in order to help students prepare for this sort of task, which will appear on the CMTs.
In our activity, we began by discussing what sorting, classifying, and ordering mean. Then, we made a list of many different possible ways to sort or order the items (by size, canned or boxed, store brand or name brand, vegetarian and non-vegetarian, etc.) Students worked in pairs to classify the items and wrote an explanation of how they went about sorting or ordering the non-perishables. It was a fun activity, good community service, and a valuable math lesson. Click on the thumbnail of the letter to read a thank you letter from Gifts of Love.
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