Poetry Math Challenges and Problem Solving

I was surprised to learn this week how many of your children love poetry. A generous Mathlete parent gave me a book of math poems and I learned that many of my favorite authors also love math. The attached pdf has 15 short biographies of major poets including Poe, Lear, Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Whitman, Frost, Milne, Nash, Williams, Ciardi, Hughes, and Silverstein.

 

The K-1st Graders only have 7 of these poems in their packet given the complexity of the math challenges. The older students have all 15 poems. In addition, I created more math challenges around the same concepts in the poems in another pdf. 

 

My goals for the students are to read aloud each of these poems to their parents and siblings and try to solve each challenge on their own and together. You may want to have a pad of stickies available since I put a hint label on each of the poems with pictures and/or prompts to give them a push and you may want to cover the hint at first. I also highlighted the key phrases in each poem. Solving the additional challenges can be fun for the whole family.

 

The concepts range from geometry (how many cuts to create a certain number of pieces), adding consecutive numbers on opposing pages of a book, perimeter and area of rectangles, pizza area and subtraction, adding rows of sharks teeth, multiplication with fractions, percent of a whole, multiplication and division, cost of non-whole number items, remainders in division, decimals from unit fractions, multiplying fractions, etc. We will expand each of these concepts throughout the year with the children.

 

 

Finally, since there are 335 hours between classes given the Thanksgiving vacation for many of the children, they could consider writing their own poems with imbedded math challenges. Maybe someday we can compile a book of their poems.

AttachmentSize
Poetry_Math_3-7_15_Poems.pdf3.37 MB
Poetry_Math_3-7_Extra_Challenges.pdf618.65 KB
Poetry_Math_k-1_7_poems.pdf1.71 MB
Poetry_Math_k-1_Extra_Challenges.pdf341.37 KB