Math they will Love

To help students see the beauty of math - that it can be used to help explain the world around them.

My name is Matt Kitchen, M.Ed., and I have been teaching middle grades math for five years in Cleveland, Ohio. During my first year of teaching I was struggling to get my students interested or engaged in math. After discussing this with my students I quickly figured out they did not care about math because it did not seem relevant to their lives. Knowing this, I began designing engaging lessons for students in the middle grades (4-9) that would show my students where math existed in their lives.

I designed numerous engaging lessons that take real-life activities and wrap a mathematical concept around them. After my first full year of using them in 2007 my state test scores doubled. The lessons did not solely increase the scores but helped to create a new mathematically engaged learning environment in my classroom that lead to my students being more involved in the learning process.

Real-Life Math is not a simple collection of lesson ideas and examples of how math is used in real life. These lessons are activities that are ready for your students to actually participate in. There is zero guess work as I include lesson plans and student worksheets with every lesson so you can start using them with your students right away.

The lessons are 100% original and have been created by myself. These lessons are unique because I began by focusing on what my students are interested in and then brought math into their world. Bringing math into their world personalizes it in a way many students have not experienced before and creates a far greater interest in the subject. These lessons were designed using common base standards for grades six, seven, and eight but have been used as low as grade four and as high as seniors in high school.

All lessons include a teacher's guide that explains how to conduct the activity and a student worksheet that guides the student and poses problems. Each lesson also contains extensions with which you can make the lesson new and take it in a slightly different way. These extensions will allow you to use these lessons several times with the same students. All of these are printable as they are downloaded in PDF form. Finally, each lesson contains a video of me teaching the lesson in a way that will help guide students through the lessons, show examples and help pose questions and answers.

Please feel free to contact me with any and all inquiries. I usually answer all e-mail the same day.

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