Hosted by BC School Districts 53 and 57, educators from across the Okanagan region came together on August 28 for a summer institute focusing on Reggio-Inspired Learning Experiences in Mathematics. We looked at the principles and practices inspired but the centres in Reggio Emilia, Italy and made connections to our context here in BC. We looked at the idea of provocations, the role of materials and mathematical routines and looked at projects that are connected to place, community and culture.
The day before the session, I wandered around Penticton taking some photographs that inspired my own mathematical thinking and questions and used these as provocations for the educators to think about different ways to connect mathematics to place, community and culture.
Where do you see mathematics? What connections are you making? What questions do you have?
In November, we set up a lesson observation in a grades 4&5 classroom at Tuc-el-Nuit Elementary School in Oliver where educators were able to observe an inquiry-based mathematics lesson focusing on the big idea of number (numbers represent quantity) with a focus on fractions and decimal numbers. The curricular competencies I focused on in my planning were using reasoning to explore and make connections as well as connecting mathematical concepts to each other. The guiding questions were:
What is the relationship between these numbers?
What connections are you making?
How do different materials inspire your thinking about numbers?
We began with the Alike and Different routine to engage students with thinking about different types of numbers and to bring out the math language they had. I wrote six numbers on the whiteboard and asked students how they were alike and how they were different.
We then focused on working with materials and students were invited to record and share their findings. We talked about how some materials were more likely to inspire connections to fractional thinking while others helped them think about decimal numbers. As students, shared their findings, we went back to our guiding questions for this time together and focused on the connections they were making about fractions and decimal numbers.
A third session will be held in spring 2019.
For more information, contact Melia Dirk at [email protected]
~Janice
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