7th Grade Read Alouds

Sometimes middle schoolers can have a reputation for being superficial and academically apathetic. While I'm sure there are days when they earn that reputation, that doesn't mean we should expect it of them. When we had to do a read aloud in our dyad placement, I was a little nervous. It seemed unlikely that a 7th grade math class would want to listen to me read aloud about anything. So naturally I chose a children's book.

Before I began reading, I asked students to pay attention to both the author’s intended meaning as well as the ways they could relate it to math. After the read aloud they told me a few of the things they noticed. They compared the book to their lessons on proportional reasoning, noticing that there was a part to part ratio of 3:1 of wolves to pigs. After this comment was made, another student commented that the part to whole ratio would be either 1:4 or 3:4, depending on whether you were comparing wolves or pigs. They also noticed that the ratios in this story were inverses of those in the original story of the 3 Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. They also related the story to math by saying that the wolves really had to think and work together in order to come up with the initially less obvious solution to their problem.

Before I read them the story, I had pretty low expectations of the outcome. I wasn't even sure that the students would pay attention. Interestingly enough, in the discussion following, students who didn't typically participate in math class were some of the first to raise there hands. It was a great experience to remind me to set high expectations for my students no matter what.