and to count the materials, supplies, and desks used. Boys and girls have opportunities to keep records; to look for page numbers and count pages in books; to tell time; to note the time used for school activities; and to take charge of mail, savings, and school banks. In higher grades pupils have opportunities to collect and manage school lunch money, earn money for trips, learn how to budget time and money, and to get experience and develop competence in using arithmetic in other real situations. School Parties When children entertain, they have experiences in using numbers. A third grade, planning a party for their mothers, made the following price list for supplies: Chocolate cake mix-(2 boxes) 76¢ Vanilla ice cream- -(38 servings) $1.90 Paper cups (40) 10¢ Milk 21¢ The children wrote the following invitation, which also involved use of numbers: October 29, 1951 Dear Mother: Could you come to our party Wednesday at two? Please give 25¢ to help pay for it. Love, School Stores Activities with opportunities for children to work with numbers in real situations occur in connection with school stores. The makebelieve store with its empty boxes and fake money is giving way to the cooperative store. The latter, as in some schools in Texas, Georgia, New York, and other States, is organized by the children with real items for children and real money. Sometimes these stores are open for business at noon, sometimes before school in the morning. Both rural and city schools use the idea, sometimes selling to parents in the neighborhood. A New York State pupil group has charge of the school store. Each year the pupils prepare carefully for their task. In their preparation, some emphasis is on improving their reading, especially in locating and reading information to help them set up the store. But most of the emphasis is on arithmetic because to manage the store the boys and girls need to be good accountants. They need especially to know how to make change, to keep records, and to make out bills. When they have learned these things to their satisfaction and to the satisfaction of the teacher, they open the store to the public (the pupils from other grades who wish to buy pencils, paper, erasers, shoestrings, and tooth paste). Profits are given to charity. One year $15 was contributed to the March of Dimes. The pupils learn to write checks. The high-chool commercial teacher helps them audit their books. Each child keeps a store book. The entries in one child's store book read: Jan. 11, 1951 Jim Dunham and Lynn Mathers are clerks today. They took in $5.00 today. Business was good this morning. Jan. 19, 1951 Ted and Billie are clerks now. They took in $4.00 this morning. We will help the March of Dimes today. Arithmetic makes sense and you can eat the results, Greenville, Miss. The teacher helps the children count the money. One clerk has the money. The other clerk counts aloud. At the close of the day, the clerks plan for the commercial teacher to help them write checks. They looked in the store books for the amount taken in each day. They refer to their store books to answer the teacher's questions: Which day did we have the best business? Which day did we have the poorest business? Which days did we take in an even number of dollars? When the teacher asks how much is taken in for the week, it takes discussion to get the amounts placed right for adding. A second grade in Louisiana made a chart to show how much milk each child drank each day. Opposite each child's name was a series of squares. In each square was a picture of a bottle or bottles representing a quart, a pint, or a half-pint of milk. In this connection boys and girls studied measures. They labeled their bottles one quart, one pint, and one-half pint, according to capacity. They used a measuring cup to prove that two cups make one pint. Here was a use of arithmetic that made sense to the boys and girls. A sixth grade in the same school used advertisements from daily newspapers to set up orders on grocery slips. They totaled the cost of the items on the slips. They developed menus that would make balanced diets for their families. In discussions, they considered the cost of different articles of food in relation to their food value. They ran some experiments with mold on food in order to emphasize the importance of proper care of food in the home. These activities provide further examples of ways in which children can learn arithmetic meaningfully. Teaching Use of Numbers in School Situations An example of teaching the use of numbers so that they make sense to children is the following from Kansas: The teacher asked the class to stand. She asked Robert to walk among the children and count them. The other children counted silently so that they would be able to help Robert if he needed help. Then she asked the boys to stand while Jane counted them. Next she asked individual children to bring to a long table a number of objects that the class would use for a game, including nine color sheets, ten crayons, and six name cards. Activities of this type are repeated until all the children have had an opportunity to count objects. An Oregon primary group talked over the attendance situation and planned for the attendance to be checked by a pupil regularly each morning and afternoon. Most of the schools use simple ways like this to make numbers meaningful to the children. It is an important step in teaching numbers. It is followed usually by opportunities for the children to practice the facts and computations that they do not learn well enough in the real situations to use automatically. Computing Cost of Travel In a Wisconsin school, the eighth grade takes a 2-day trip to Devil's Lake and Wisconsin Dells. The children earn their own money from sales of home-baked cakes, pies, and cookies, quiz shows, and assembly programs. Committees work on various aspects of the trip. The financial transactions lead to a study and use of banks. Last year's class earned enough money to pay the complete expenses of the class and to give $100 to the school as a class gift. On the trip to Devil's Lake the children see a game farm, the lake, the dells, and a moraine. These are interesting things for study. In addition to the information that the children gather from their trips, they develop understanding of numbers through planning the trip, banking money, and paying the bills. Another Wisconsin group, a seventh and eighth grade, take a bus trip to a nearby city. The first year this trip was taken the children sold magazines to raise enough money. They were so enthusiastic about the trip and the experience seemed so worth while that parents decided to urge the trip as part of the regular school program for seventh and eighth grades and to recommend that it be paid for out of school funds. School Services A Utah school uses experiences in giving service to the school as opportunities to make the children's use of numbers more meaningful. A junior high school girl, for example, helps the school clerk. Upper-grade children sell tickets for skits and plays produced by the school and the parent clubs. They have a hand in selecting and purchasing school equipment with the money made. They serve as cashiers in cafeterias, as in an Oregon school. All profits from such sales go into the school account. Sixth-grade boys and girls help the younger children learn games, record scores, divide into groups, and the like. A sixth-grade group in a Missouri school used numbers with meaning in planning Christmas presents. They measured to find out, for example, how many luncheon mats would be made from a 125-foot roll of waxed paper if each mat required two 15-inch strips. They computed the cost per mat. Children learn to use arithmetic in many ways that make sense to them. The following ideas seem to stand out in the programs of most of the schools visited: (a) Boys and girls have opportunities to take part in all (b) Children take part in services for the school involv- (c) Progress is evaluated frequently and individually. (d) Teachers make periodic checks to see whether the (e) For children who need more teaching than the reg- (f) New skills are taught to the children in small Using Science Meaningfully Science is used to enrich many major activities and to help solve problems, in connection with which other subjects are also used. Some visitors report aquariums, terrariums, window gardens, outdoor gardens, collections of rocks and minerals, electric apparatus, magnets, and soil collections. Children study winds and weather and make observations and records. They study about rain and snow and the benefits of these to crops, trees, and flowers. They observe the stars. They listen to bird songs and calls. They make collections of newspaper and magazine articles on inventions, new cars, airplanes, radio, eclipses, and the stars. They read about new kinds of plants and new breeds of animals. They read and study about their pets and learn to take good care of them. |