According to qualified psychologist and teacher Renata Paradowska, the opportunities to implement maths in all school subjects are endless. Here she suggests ways in which all teachers should make maths an integral part of their lessons, whichever subject they teach.
Why maths?
Maths skills are crucial. Look around you and you will see maths everywhere: planning your shopping, how much of the break you’ve got left before your next lesson, measuring the right amount of flour for that cake you’re making… It’s all about numeracy. Too often we leave it to the maths teachers to teach the numbers, when it is a joint effort of every educator at school. We ought to prepare our learners for the big world out there meaning they need to know how to plan their journey for dream holidays, estimate energy bills, or, simply, figure out their fertile days in a menstrual cycle – pretty important skill, don’t you think?
I find it interesting that many schools have literacy reps and require their departments to come up with literacy policies, yet they ignore the interdependence of maths. Just as we all teach literacy by the mere fact that we deliver most subjects in the English medium, so we should approach numeracy and see opportunities to teach ‘maths language’ in every topic we deliver.
No need to change your lessons to implement maths
Whatever subject you teach, I challenge you to find at least three opportunities to teach some numeracy in the next month. And if you do it every month, you will give your students about 30 free maths tutorials throughout the year – wouldn’t that be great?
Whether it is calculating calorie intake or heart rate (PE), speed of bacteria growth (science), income tax deductions (business), temperature changes (geography), length of a monarch’s reign (history), number of possible combinations of how Shakespeare’s name can be misspelled (English), cost of smoking (PSHE), number of people that can sit in an average church pew (RE), making a model out of three triangles (product design/art), calculating different ratios of batter mix (food tech), finding out how many pairs of shoes need to be placed in line to get from one wall to the other (tutor time)… the possibilities are endless!
Top tips to implement maths
- Vary your methods: mix between calculations and graph interpretation; switch between weight, time, volume, and other relevant measures.
- Use real life statistics, of which there are plenty on the Office for National Statistics website.
- Make use of real life objects, e.g. food items have lots of numerical info on them.
- Set fun research-based homework tasks where students have to go to a shop, bus or even public toilets (well, I’ve done that with my lot!) to collect some data for the next lesson.
- At the end of a lesson, set students with a task to think of as many calculations/numbers related to a specific topic as possible; it could be as easy as counting the number of words in a poem.
- Use every opportunity to convert measurements, e.g. kilograms to pounds, weeks to months, dollar to euro, etc.
- Insist on correct use of units and words related to numeracy, e.g. ‘number’ vs ‘amount’ vs ‘volume’; ‘many’ vs ‘much’; ‘plenty’ vs ‘lots’.
- Remember that maths is not only about the numbers – it is also about shapes and general logical thinking skills, so drawings or riddles are also ok.
- Keep reminding them they have just learnt some maths and praise small successes – that will build their confidence.
- Purchase a set of cheap calculators for your classroom and distribute them when needed.
Use ideas from other subjects
Here are some examples that I would use in one of my three subjects, child development. It’s incredible to see some of my low ability students learn maths without even realising I’ve sneaked it into the lesson.
Calculate the fertile days based on a real calendar
We do similar activities with calculating weeks of pregnancy, changing weeks into months, figuring out in which trimester a dating scan would be performed, etc.
Interpret statistics
You can find statistics on almost any topic you wish. Here is one of the graphs that I would ask my students to work with.
Source: Office For National Statistics, permission granted under the Open Government License.
Example questions to the graph:
- what percentage drop was recorded in families 3+ between 2003 and 2013?
- what was the total number of families having 1 and 2 children in 2013?
Extension task: how about doing a small survey in class and asking students to draw a bar chart summarising their findings as part of the homework?
Calculate and compare the prices of products
In child development, we deal with many baby items that we analyse in terms of safety and price. I send students out to do some market research as part of their homework and they are to return with photos from the shop shelves of various nappies available on sale. Then I would ask them to calculate the unit price per nappy by dividing the total price by the number of nappies inside the pack. We estimate how many nappies a parent would have to use within a day, then within a week and month to finally arrive at a figure of annual cost of nappy changing.
| Nappy brand | Price per pack | Unit price | Daily spending |
| Pampers | |||
| Huggies | |||
| Fred & Flo | |||
| Sainsbury’s Little Ones | |||
| Lidl Lupilu |
The finale
So, have I inspired you to implement maths into your lessons? If so, make sure you share this article amongst your fellow teachers and on social media. Let us spread the love of maths and get our kids to love it too!
Renata Paradowska is a qualified psychologist and teacher with over ten years’ experience in working with both children and adults. She has been delivering child development courses since 2015. Her academic interests include cognitive neuroscience and early brain development. She is currently head of the Child Development, Psychology and Criminology Department in a mainstream school in Berkshire alongside creating resources for Cambridge University Press.
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