On Monday, March 2nd, my school is celebrating Read Across America Day. How can I incorporate this theme into my 8th grade math classes?

The National Education Association annually sponsors Read Across America. Now in its twelfth year, the program focuses on motivating children to read, in addition to helping them master basic skills. " Hmm... motivating them to read AND helping them master basic math skills. How about having them write a short story about a real-life situation where the math they're learning would be beneficial to people (basically motivating them to think "this class is useful" instead of "this class is useless"), then putting it all into a book and handing the book out to the class to keep and read each other's stories?

This way it's reading/writing based to celebrate the day, but it's also math based by making them think about how to put the math they're learning into action for the good of people.

Try reading them a chapter or two from the Life of Fred math series! These books are hilarious, inexpensive, written by a math professor, and geared to get kids to understand why math is important in real life. Even the problems are a riot, like "When Joe went out fishing with Darlene, she packed two baskets.

One of them was their lunch--five baloney sandwiches. The other basket had bait in it--zillions of little meal worms. Joe accidentally ate 6/17 of the basket with the bait.

What fraction of the bait basket did he leave uneaten? " Another example: "When Darlene was getting ready to go fishing with Joe, she needed to do two things: pack some bait in her purse in case Joe forgot to bring some, and, second, put on some sun screen lotion so she wouldn't get sunburned. Are those two things--packing bait and putting on sunscreen--commutative?"

Both problems are from Life of Fred-Fractions. You can read the introduction and a few chapters of each of the 6 books online at http://www.polkadotpublishing.com . I know you can't get the book by tomorrow, but perhaps you can use a problem or two, and read your class the beginning to get them wanting more.

kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/ This is a great website (done by a math professor) for finding works of fiction that talk about math, including plenty of short stories. It has ratings for both mathematical content and 'literary' value.

Well, there is the obvious: "story problems"! However, you could also take some time to read to the students about some of the great mathematicians: james.fabpedigree.com/mathmen.htm If you had a copy of MY book (The Secret of Success is not a Secret, I'd tell you to turn to page 225 and read them the story about Wernher von Braun. He failed 9th grade math and was planning on becoming a laborer until he read a (German) book that contained complex math problems and wanted to understand them.

He went on to become a leading rocket scientist.

It's kind of elementary, but my favorite book when I was little was Math Curse by Jon Scieszka. You could incorporate some of the ideas of the book into math problems more suited to the level of your class.

This website has some free math ebooks in pdf form. They are printable so you can print out the pages you want. I saw some that looked to be suitable for middle school kids.

They also have teacher resourses in pdf ebook form. xpmath.com/ebooks/math_ebooks.php.

My two favorite books on Math for that age group are Kiss My Math ( geared toward girls ) by Danica McKellar - She also wrote Math doesn't suck which is really good too. My daughter read both of these books and is now in honors math - before reading these books she didn't think she was that good in math. And The physics of Superheros ( geared toward little dudes and little dudes at heart ) Make reading about math fun.

From a non educator point of view, work on using the day to show students how important it is to understand word (story) problems. It will be a rare event in real life when they will ever have to simply solve for X with A and B given. Show them that they must read to get the facts of a problem and to make sure they are answering the right question.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.