On Saturday, October 1st, we hosted over 120 educators at Blair Elementary for our first Fall Institute. Building on the interest on place-based practices in mathematics during our Spring Institute at Lions Bay Community School, we chose to host our fall event at Blair, a more typical "suburban" school setting. The staff at Blair have worked towards more outdoor learning experiences for their students over several years - beginning with Spuds in Tubs, to garden beds to an outdoor learning space.
We had originally planned this event for about 50 people but as the waiting list grew and grew, we decided to open it up and move to the gym to hold more people. An event of this size takes a team and I would like to acknowledge and thank Michelle, Lauren, April, Karen and Catherine for all their help in pulling this event together.
We gathered together in the gym and teachers were welcomed with tea and cookies and table displays to provoke their thinking.
Some questions guided our professional inquiry for the day:
How does place inform your questions and inquiries?
How does place inspire mathematical thinking?
and inspired by the First Peoples Principles of Learning -
How might the teaching and learning of mathematics be more holistic?
How might a sense of place be nurtured through the teaching and learning of mathematics?
I shared several examples from Richmond schools, showing how teachers and students have been connecting place and mathematics. We also examined connections between place, story, mathematics and maps. Teachers had an opportunity to map a place of importance to them using materials at their tables - shells, stones, wood, cedar branches, pencil crayons and washi tape. As teachers engaged in this task, they were asked to be mindful of the mathematics is involved – spatial awareness, measurement, distance, proportional reasoning, scale, 2D representation of 3D objects...what else comes to mind?
We looked closely at the mathematics of measurement, a concept and process particularly relevant to engaging in outdoors mathematics learning.
We had time outside together to engage in pedagogical provocations.
Richmond teachers shared their experiences with outdoor learning. April and Lauren talked about how their Wilderness Wednesday program has evolved and different structures they have in place for their students when they are outside. Anne-Marie Fenn from Woodward shared the ways her whole school community is engaged in school gardening projects. Megan Zeni from Homma Elementary shared how her outdoor learning position at her school came to be and shared some ways she uses the school's garden and outdoor learning spaces daily with the school's students.
Over lunch and again during some planning & connecting time in the afternoon, teachers visited April and Lauren's classroom spaces and Karen Choo also opened up her grades 4&5 classroom because teachers were wanting to see an intermediate classroom.
The text slides shared during the day are available on the Articles and Presentations page found in the right side bar of this site.
It was an amazing day of learning together and community building. As I packed up my car with tubs and baskets, I felt exhausted but all filled up. It was a special day with educators from all across BC - as far away as Salmon Arm and Vancouver Island & Salt Spring. It was a special day thinking and sharing about ways to make mathematics learning engaging and meaningful for our students and for our teaching to be more holistic and responsive.
~Janice
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