Project Service Leadership

Ideas for Enriching Math Classes
Mathematics 1.4: The student understands and applies the concepts and procedures of mathematics: probability and statistics.

Possible Service-Learning Projects:

• Use mathematical information to determine appropriate actions.
• Complete a survey and then present your findings using graphs and diagrams.

Mathematics 2: The student solves problems using mathematics.

Possible Service-Learning Projects:

• Interpret mathematical charts and other information to make a decision.
• Graph the data collected from water sampling and use the results to make recommendations to policy makers.

Service-Learning Projects

Urban Schoolyard Habitat Project:
The Urban Schoolyard Habitat Project was a pilot project designed to reclaim a natural habitat for indigenous plant and animal life in the schoolyard of Richmond Elementary School. Once created, the habitat served as an environmental classroom for the school and community and a replication model for other urban schools. Curriculum areas included writing, research, math and communications.

Math/World Cultures Project:
Students marketed third world crafts to support impoverished artisans overseas, as well as raise money for the local emergency food bank.

The Community Gardens Project:
The aim of the Community Gardens Project is to have students creating gardens in their classrooms. They can eat the produce and learn about math (growth rates) nutrition and biology in the meantime. They then go out and start gardens in the community.

Watt Watchers:
Watt Watchers is a two-day interdisciplinary program that teaches students in grades 4-6 and their teachers to view their school building as an electricity consumer. Students learn to recognize problems that waste electricity, to identify appropriate (and cost effective) solutions to the problems, to quantify the savings and to get action on their recommendations.

Analyzing food based food’s nutritional value and cost effectiveness?

In an effort to ensure that the packages being assembled were the most nutritious, satiating, and economical, students explored how to to come up with a rating that takes all of these things into account. Using the ND rating and Fullness Factor they established  the price per calorie for each food, and created ratios for the nutrition and satiety of each food that was analyzed.

Other Ideas

• Tutor younger students in math skills.
• Conduct surveys on community needs and process and analyze the results.
• Count species of animals or measure and count trees and other plant life for the Department of Natural Resources or Agriculture.
• Calculate needs and measure building materials for construction projects such as installing wheelchair ramps.
• Interview local businesses about how they use math in their daily work and publish the results in a booklet for other math classes. Problems could be included that would show practical applications for a range of math concepts.
• Help food banks, food crops or local businesses with their monthly or quarterly inventories.
• Assist small businesses or farms with basic bookkeeping such as cross checking journal entries or totaling columns.