It was World Book Day on Thursday, March 3rd and this year World Book Day is celebrating its 25th birthday year. (See also: Literacy Skills in Mathematics).
There are a wealth of resources on the World Book Day site for children of all ages, including I noticed, good perhaps for reluctant readers, these free podcasts.
Here are some very nice World Book Day Maths Problems from Laura Rees-Hughes.
I think that’s 71 pages.
For younger students, this revision resource of problems was created for Year 6 (age 10-11) to use on World Book Day.
We could bring books and Mathematics together with some Statistics. UK readers who remember Statistics coursework may remember AQA’s coursework task ‘Read All About It’ where students considered various newspapers and magazines for readability. Similarly, we have Edexcel’s Newspaper Comparisons. A search for these old coursework tasks returned this Edexel document which has numerous investigations with mark schemes; Newspaper Comparisons is on page 171. The document is a very useful source of problems and data handling activities.
For a list of recommended books for young people interested in Mathematics, see this page which includes this list from Nrich which is grouped into three different categories: History of Mathematics, Recreational and Thinking Mathematically.
See also:
- Maths Reviews and Recommendations from Plus Magazine
- Simon Singh on Great Mathematics Books
- Recommendations from Alex Bellos
- Recommended Mathematics reading from the University of Oxford (scroll right down the page).
We could consider the reading age of a text; consider these 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.
WolframAlpha can be used for Words and Linguistics, note the various examples given, including number names and document length. We could do some calculations, estimate what happens if we have 40 pages or 400 pages? We could practise using Standard form for the number of characters.
Alternatively, try Analyze My Writing. Simply paste in some text for a comprehensive analysis including basic statistics, word and sentence length and readability. It is also possible to create Cloze tests. You can read more about this resource on Richard Byrne’s always impressive “Free Technology for Teachers”.
It seems appropriate to check some world records on books! Did you know that the first collection of crossword puzzles was published in the USA in 1924?
On the subject of books see free books information.
Note in particular Colin Foster’s KS3 Instant Maths Ideas (3 books) – a wealth of ideas you can try in the classroom and now freely available online. Colin Foster is a Reader in Mathematics Education in the Mathematics Education Centre at Loughborough University.
I tried the text of this post for readability – college level!