Younger elementary students often imitate adult behavior during play. During a semistructured playtime, let students break into groups and play at being shopkeepers and customers in a make-believe shop. Depending on the age level, you can use the activity to teach mental math and addition when tallying up a bill, subtraction when calculating discounts, multiplication when purchasing numerous items and percentages when calculating sales tax. They might add up the prices of multiple items to arrive at the bill's total. When you start the activity, check students' work by providing sheets of paper and reviewing calculations for accuracy. Later, switch the focus to mental math and check students' work by going over the totals that each "grocer" received compared with the groceries each "shopper" walked away with.
Story problems help contextualize mathematics into real-life situations. Have students dramatize scenarios by incorporating dramatizations into problem set activities. For example, if the first story problem from a problem set requires that Sally divide four cookies evenly among eight friends, pick one student to play Sally and seven others to play her friends and let them act out the scene in front of the class. This allows students to observe how each cookie must be broken into two to feed eight people, helping them understand the meaning of the problem's fractional answer.
You can also give math a culturally specific context that reflects your students' lifestyles. If you live in a rural area, you might select problems that reflect rural themes, such as measuring the amount of fencing necessary to enclose a pasture of given dimensions. For a class that lives in a large city, you can ask students to calculate the necessary public transportation fares for a group field trip. If your students are fans of a local sports team, have them compare batting averages or performance statistics of various team players.
Nature provides an excellent context for teaching mathematics; many natural materials are inexpensive and easy to find and the relationship between math and nature spans myriad mathematical themes and levels. For elementary learners, you can keep your nature-based lessons quite simple. For example, to teach about measurement, you can bring in a collection of leaves. Have students measure the length, width, volume and weight of individual leaves. Let them use estimation and then measurement to determine this same information for a large pile of leaves. For percentage and fraction practice, use the leaves as manipulatives, instructing students to remove a certain percentage or fraction of them from the pile.