Image – Klara Kim on flickr

Well we may not have World Maths Day this March (it’s in October, and I see from my blog statistics that people are looking for it!) but we do have World Book Day (5th March).

We could bring books and Mathematics together with some Statistics (at any time); have a look at this resource from TES, World Book Day Maths Data Investigation where students analyse word length and sentence length in some book extracts. UK readers who remember Statistics coursework, this brings back memories of AQA’s coursework task ‘Read All About It’ where students considered various newspapers and magazines for readability.

The extension task for the TES resource above considers the reading age of a text, you may wish to consider further readability formulae; if you paste some text to this site, Readability Formulas you can easily check statistics for your chosen text and generate a reading age according to the various tests.

Alternatively, try Analyze My Writing. You can read more about this resource on Richard Byrne’s always impressive “Free Technology for Teachers”.

I tried the text of this post for readability – college level? You should be fine!