Math Using Photographs

I attended the National Catholic Educational Association Convention this year and brought back an idea I am very excited about.  It was all about using photographs to teach math.  Well, I introduced it to my Kinders and they loved it.  I pulled a few photos from the internet but their favorite activity was going outside to take their own photos.  The photo shown below is actually a picture of a flower one of my students made from our math blocks.  I was amazed at all the great mathematic thinking my little Kinders were able to pull out of this one photo.

With this photo, the children saw shapes and came up with several number sentences.  For example, they saw the red blocks as 3+3+3=9.  They counted the light green squares and the dark green squares.  My kinders had to justify and explain every observation they made before we wrote it on the board.

When the idea was presented at the convention it was actually for older students.  The older students actually took their own photos and wrote about the math in the photos as a class project.  My favorite projects showed pictures of good math and bad math the students had found.  They showed things like sale signs showing prices with a dollar sign and a cent sign.  The most important part of these projects is the student's explanation about why it's good math or bad math.