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How does science love math; let me count the ways. :D

Seriously though, I love that you asked this question. Today one of my colleagues was teaching hydroponics and I got to observe the lesson. They were learning about different systems used for hydroponics. Last week they planted beans in various growing mediums and some of them sprouted and were quite tall. As teams of students got up to share the variety of systems, I checked out the plants and saw the students had made graphs to chart the growth of plants. (measurement over time) That was 5th grade.

4th grade is working on the climate in our state so they are using a variety of stimulus like maps and graphs to determine what the average rainfall is in each region of the state. They are also using the daily newspaper to check the weather forecast and sadly, we have 100% chance of rain predicted for Halloween night!

We held a STEM Night last week and students were doing liquid and solids measurement for chemical reactions. At one of the stations they made marshmallow shooters and had to measure which team shot their marshmallows the farthest. We made blubber gloves for another station and they had to check the temperature in the water. Another station was gliding paper robots and they had to measure the strongs for their robots to climb/glide on. 

Brianna, 

There are so many great and fairly simple ways to incorporate math into science! Like you said, they are closely related, so that helps a lot. I am a student at the University of Northern Iowa, and I’m currently enrolled in a Science Methods course for Elementary Education. I will be teaching an upcoming lesson along with a few other group mates at the end of November. Although we’re still working on finalizing the lesson plan, we plan to end the lesson with a chart or graph of some sort. Students will be exploring and conducting an investigation for the first part of the lesson, so we want them to come back together at the end of the lesson in order to share out their results. We are debating either having students make simple graphs on their own or with their table mates, but another option we thought of involves students sharing results verbally as one of us makes a chart on the board. We could then work on making a graph all together of the class results as a whole in order to ensure everyone is on the same page while making the graph. Depending on the grade level, this could go either way. Graphs and charts are ways that I’ve seen other teachers in the past also link math and science together. I think it’s very effective!