Reggio-Inspired Mathematics

BCRIM CGI Book Club 2022-2023

For the 2022-2023 school year, teachers in our project voted on having a book club experience and we selected the book Children's Mathematics: Cognitively Guided Instruction by Thomas Carpenter Elizabeth Fennema et al (Second Edition).

Some of the reasons we chose to focus on this book is CGI's focus on honouring children's thinking and how they share their thinking and how math is contextualized creating opportunities for connecting mathematics to story, place and identity. When we looked at alignment with the principles and practices of The Reggio Emilia Approach and our BC K-12 Mathematics Curriculum, this book was a very good fit.

 

We met once a term as a cross-district network and then district teams also met in their district to share and analyze children's thinking about math problems.

During our cross-district network meetings, we spent time together learning about the specific problem types for addition and subtraction and then multiplication and division. We also discussed the strategies to listen and look for as students' share their thinking and solutions about different problem types presented to them. In our last session together, we looked at ways to extend CGI instruction, with a focus on mathematical modeling, problem-posing, having students build on each other's ideas.

An example of a district teams meeting is SD38 -Richmond. We met three times during the school year in The Studio at Grauer. For each session we focused on a few chapters of the book, shared, discussed and analyzed children's thinking about problems we had done with classes and set intentions for our next meeting. At our February meeting, we looked at the addition and subtraction problem structures through three example problems and spent time in partners anticipating how our students would engage with the problems, considering the three strategies of direct modelling, counting and derived fact.

   

More info about other district team meetings will be added as more info is received.

We have also been sharing our thinking together on a CGI Book Club padlet HERE.

Some information and resources about CGI mathematics can be found on Janice's district blog HERE.

~Janice

BCRIM book club 2023-2024: Mathematizing Children's Literature

For the next school year, our BC Reggio-Inspired Mathematics project has selected to engage with the book Mathematizing Children's Literature: Sparking Connections, Joy, and Wonder through Read-Alouds and Discussion  by Allison Hintz and Antony T. Smith. Allison and Tony are professors at the University of Washington (Bothell). More information can be found on the publishers website HERE.

Canadians can order the book through Pembroke Publishers HERE.

We will be hosting an online launch of the book club in September or October, followed by district teams meeting to discuss the book and put the ideas the book into practice throughout the school year.

~Janice