Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Baseball & Math

So I'm sitting in my living room, coming down off my high from the Blue Jays win and being the nerdy teacher that I am, I think..."How can I incorporate the world series into math lessons?"
So I look up online and of course there are hundreds of baseball themed math lessons. Obviously I wasn't the first person to think of this.
I found a few interesting activities off this website
http://illuminations.nctm.org/Lesson.aspx?id=1025
I think the easiest connection between baseball and math is statistics. You can have your students try to figure out Jose Bautista's playoff batting average by calculating the number of hits and divide it by the number of at bats. Even students that don't follow baseball can relate because it's just a different example for calculating mean.
Who else has used athletics or baseball in their math lesson planning? How effective is it for those students that are athletic and can relate to baseball a lot more easily?

1 comment:

  1. What a great resource! Especially to use with classes during all the excitement of the Jay's playoff run. Right now similar activities looking at basketball or hockey statistics would likely go over well too with the playoffs (and Raptors!).

    I recently taught for two years at a private sports school in Toronto and while I didn't teach math, I was very close with the teacher who did. She would incorporate sports related examples throughout the curriculum on close to a daily basis. With all the students being high level athletes, they certainly were much more engaged.

    I also know sports related activities like math bowling can be great for some of the younger grades! Thanks for your post.

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