On Saturday, February 17 2018, educators from Richmond, Coquitlam, Burnaby, Vancouver and West Vancouver met on Cypress Mountain to go snowshoeing and to consider where math lives in the winter on the mountains.
Connecting to place and community is an important principle underlying Reggio-Inspired approaches to teaching and learning. Within our BCAMT Reggio-Inspired Collaborative Inquiry Project, educators across many districts have been investigating ways to have students connect to place, culture and community to think about mathematics. We began our snowshoeing adventure with considering the questions: What math do we see? What math lives here? What mathematics is involved in snowshoeing? How does snow provide a context for thinking about mathematics?
Snow had fallen overnight and it was continuing to snow as we began snowshoeing. This fresh coat of snow provided us opportunities to think about the dynamics of weather and wind and location and how snow accumulates. We were surprised how clearly 3D shape formations of snow were created in this natural space. Lauren shared some of her understanding of local indigenous knowledge about how to track and locate by looking closely at the way snow in undulating, is textured and where it accumulates.
Things that make you wonder...this interpretive sign along the snowshoeing trail inspires you to notice and wonder, be curious and ask questions.
How do you measure the amount of snow falling? the size of snowflakes? the density and depth of snow on the ground? How do these affect visibility and how we move in the snow?
Other interpretive signs along the snowshoe trails include specific information about local animals and trees. On each sign, we always found some sort of mathematical information - the height of trees, the range of territory for animals and in the case of the snowshoe hare, information about their tracks. Lauren shared with us her understanding of tracking and how different animals' tracks tell you about their movements as well as identify them.
We noticed several icicles along the trail but none piqued our interest more than the ones below we found as we were exiting the trail at the end of our snowshoeing time. How do you measure an icicle? What different attributes could you measure? How long do they take to form? What fluctuations in temperature are necessary for icicles to form? How did a dynamic environment contribute to the shape of these icicles?
An ebook and a provocation card will be shared soon!
Check the UPCOMING EVENTS section of this blog (top of right sidebar) for announcements of our next Saturday institutes.
~Janice