A great example of how to capitalize on the tremendous popularity of fantasy books can be found in the April 2005 issue of Mathematics: Teaching in the Middle School. Betsy McShea, Judith Vogel, and Maureen Yarnevich lay out a lesson in “Harry Potter and the Magic of Mathematics.” The authors focused on using Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone because it is a very popular series that almost everyone already knows about, even if they have not read the book. By using a popular story they are able to, as they say, “use examples from the books in the classroom without assigning the text as additional required reading.”
So how do the authors use Harry Potter in their classroom? Actually in a couple different ways. First, they use the money system in Harry Potter to have their students practice conversions. They create problems from the follow excerpt from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone:
“Griphook unlocked the door. A lot of green smoke came billowing out, and as it cleared, Harry gasped. Inside were mounds of gold coins. Columns of silver. Heaps of little bronze Knuts.
‘All yours,’ smiled Hagrid…
Hagrid helped harry pile some of into a bag.
‘The gold ones are Galleons,’ he explained. ‘Seventeen silver Sickles to a Galleon and twenty-nine Knuts to a Sickle, it’s easy enough.” (Rowling 1997, p. 75)
They can go onto use Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for teaching “Functions and Linear Modeling,” and finally “Probability.”
The authors lay out a wonderful article that I recommend to any teacher to read that is wanting to enliven their math class with a little fantasy that the students can relate to.
Additionally, this particular journal overall has many good articles from month to month on how to take a new look at teaching mathematics, but this issue in particular includes an interesting use of Shel Silverstein’s poems in mathematics.
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