It’s the first Wednesday of June which means it’s time for our monthly linky – Math IS Real Life!! If you want to see how the linky works, or just want other real world math ideas, check out our Pinterest Board of all the posts so that you can look back and find some great ideas and REAL pictures to use in your classroom!

If you are linking up, please include the below picture AND a link back to all four of our blogs – feel free to use the 2nd image and the links listed below!

A monthly REAL WORLD math blog link-up hosted by

4mulaFun, The Teacher Studio, Teaching to Inspire in 5th, AND MissMathDork,

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This month I have to be honest…I have had a little TOO much math in my “real life”!  We are shopping for a senior picture photographer and saw how different sitting fees, location fees, and print prices make all the options tricky to compare…tried looking at baseball tournament schedules including the “if we win, then…scenarios…I studied my calendar to try to find time to work in all my end-of-year assessments…I pulled up the Delta website as I was planning some travel…My son and I are trying to take 45 minutes of video footage and condense it to TWO minutes (now THAT is real life math!)

Each teacher in my building was “gifted” $75 from our parent group to buy new books for our classroom, so I spent some time on Scholastic trying to find ways to maximize my money AND to get see how I could maximize my bonus points to get MORE books.  I learned that my lower oven is heating about 25 degrees high so I cooked my muffins a few minutes LESS and turned the temperature down.  I noticed that my car is 500 miles past it’s recommended oil change and that the blue book price on it is several thousand dollars less than I hoped it would be.

Our dishwasher is on its way to that happy appliance land in the sky, so I started pricing out new ones both online and in the newspaper ads. I read some reviews and realized that 5 stars = more money than I was hoping to spend!  I started to make a to do list for what needs to be finished before the end of the school year and realized the following:

WORK TO DO > TIME LEFT

So…the more I tried thinking of a topic for this month, the more I realized that simply recognizing EVERYWHERE math appears in our daily lives is probably the most important topic of all–and how we help students to recognize this and celebrate this is next.  Math is everywhere and math can make sense–if we help our students see the connections.  When I told my students about all these examples of math in my world over the past week, they were shocked and all agreed that they “had never thought about it!”  It’s time to help them think about it!

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Don’t forget to check out the other MIRL posts below! Check back over the next few days – more will be added!!