Reggio-Inspired Mathematics

cross-district meeting: June 1 2023

Teams of educators from several districts joined a year-end Zoom meeting to share what projects they hav been focusing on this school year. Along with our CGI book club, districts have chosen from our three areas of focus: story, place and data.

The SD37 team shared a data project they began in the fall, collecting leaves from their school park and identifying the trees that they belong to and then collecting data about the numbers of trees. The plan was to do this as a cross-district project and compare the story of data about the trees at Delta schools but that didn't unfold as planned. Maybe next year! The SD37 team was also inspired by Vanessa's calendar/weather data project from last year and did a colours of the sky data project using beads.

Vanessa and Jen from SD35 shared how they engaged in a data project with their students about their community, including using tally charts to rec old the different types of vehicles they saw in their neighbourhood. Vanessa also shared how she used her weather data from the student calendars again this year to create a data visualization. The students "noticed and wondered" about the differences between the two calendars.

       

Laura from SD45 shared how she also was inspired by the calendar/weather data project and did this in her class as well. She also shared how her students investigated where they saw spirals in the outdoors.

 

The SD36 team focused on stories of place and collaborated with an Metis artist who created felt mats, plants and animals of the Semiahmoo and Sto:lo regions. Connected to their study of the maps, some classes visited places in their region and collected data, such as species found in the intertidal zone at the beach.

   

The educators from SD39 shared how they used Indigenous Storywork principles to think about how they might create mathematics learning experiences connected to Indigenous picture books they read with their students.

The idea of "What story does this data tell?" was a common focus for many districts and will be reflected in a collaborative resource that will be put together this summer.

At the end of our meeting, we looked ahead to next year and gathered some information about priorities.

 

We look forward to growing our project and community next year!

~Janice

BCRIM Book Club: Cultivating Mathematical Hearts

We launched our 2024-25 book club on October 3 afterschool via Zoom. This year we are reading Cultivating Mathematical Hearts: Culturally Responsive Mathematics Teaching in Elementary Classrooms by Maria del Rosario Zavala and Julia Maria Aguirre. We had educators from across BC and a guest from Ontario join the conversation. The book was introduced with the author's key purposes, definitions, and principles shared.

 

 

The following statement about the pedagogical work enacted in the book aligns with the Reggio-inspired principles and practices that we focus on.

As we read the authors' definition of Culturally Responsive Mathematics Teaching (CRMT), participants were asked what word or phrase resonated with them. The following word cloud is the results of their comments in the chat.

The slides from this year's book club launch are available here:

Download BCRIM_BookClub_Oct3_2024_slides

Our next cross-district book club session will be some time in January - the Zoom link and passcode will be emailed to subscribers (top right hand corner of this website).

We are looking forward to reading and discussing this book with educators from across the province as we think about our local contexts, students, families, and communities.

~Janice

 

back to school online mini-conference

We hosted an online mini-conference to think together about what we consider when planning and designing for learning in mathematics. We had 200 educators from across the world register to  listen to educators share how Reggio-inspired principles and practices have impacted their teaching of mathematics.

Some considerations about planning and designing for learning mathematics are shared my project teachers here:

Download BCRIM designing and planning ideas 2024

A link and passcode to a recording of the presentations will be available for 30 days here:

https://sd38.zoom.us/rec/share/ovLQZZIqL30G7jDIxLHau8WM8HLH_BSJk2vj9c-sm9A2w3pj_9mlwD-_l_orCpoL.uLHjt1ad13GrjS8n?startTime=1724810504000

Passcode: f$SqTx2%

Some resources shared during the mini-conference are shared here:

Download BCRIM Resource List August 2024

With thanks and appreciation to our presenters who shared stories of practice. 

~Janice

BCRIM Book Club: Mathematizing Children's Literature

This year we read the book Mathematizing Children's Literature: Sparking Connections, Joy, and Wonder through Read-Alouds and Discussion by Allison Hintz and Antony T. Smith. Both authors are professors at the University of Washington in Bothell with Allison's focus on mathematics education and Tony's focus on literacy education.

We held three cross-district Zoom sessions and district and school groups met in-between these sessions to collaborate and share books and ideas.

For our first Zoom session, we were fortunate to have authors Allison and Tony join us and share some of their favourite children's books and mathematical connections.

One framework we also considered when thinking about the stories we chose to read with our students is Indigenous Storywork. You can find out more about Dr. Jo-ann Archibald and her work on the Indigenous Storywork website HERE. We discussed the importance of using authentic resources when sharing Indigenous stories, learning about the author/s and illustrator/s and the region from where the story is from as well as considering different types of story structures and the Storywork principles. The Storywork principles are respect, responsibility, reverence, reciprocity, holism, inter-relatedness, and synergy.

In-person sessions focused on sharing new books we had found, sharing what we had tried, and collaborating to think of ways to engage with the instructional structures and frames provided in the book.

 

Thoughout the year, teachers in the project added to our book club padlet which you can find HERE.

 

Here are the book experiences some of the educators in our group wrote up to share:

Download BCRIM Mathemtizing Childrens Literature Write-Ups June 2024

 

And I will close with a quote from the book and a connection to the words of Loris Malaguzzi of Reggio Emilia.

~Janice

an urban math walk in Vancouver, April 20 2024

On April 20, 2024, a group of educators from across the lower mainland met at the plaza of the Vancouver Art Gallery to begin an urban math walk, guided by Lauren MacLean and myself. We introduced ourselves and each participant was provided with a little bag and a postcard with questions to provoke our thinking as we walked.

In each participants little bag, there was a collection of tools from Math Anywhere,  a pencil, and a #BCreggio math button. An example of the tools for finding math included these shape finding frames:

  

This was the general route we took, needing to make a few detours.

We began our walk down the street from the art gallery, with a public art installation.

Public art is common in urban spaces and often is changed out over time. Many cities have websites with more information about their public art installations such as the City of Vancouver's website HERE, Vancouver Biennale HERE and the Vancouver Mural Fest HERE. 

Public art is a great way to connect mathematics to the world and explore mathematical concepts such as shape, design, symmetry, size, scale, pattern, ratio, etc. Some other public art installations we visited were from Biennale projects and from the Vancouver Mural Festival. 

As we walked we discussed all sorts of mathematical connections and possibilities for investigations such as collecting data on modes of transportation, estimating heights of buildings, a timeline of the city's development, impact of humans on living and non-living things in the spaces we walked through, and how numbers are used to organize and label a city. In Vancouver we also bumped up against the use of water by humans for transportation, recreation and industry. What questions might our students have? How might mathematics help us understand these urban places and spaces?


What an amazing morning we had together, re-connecting in person under clear blue skies, exploring the city and nudging each others' thinking. Many educators attending shared how they were inspired to take ideas from our walk together back to their schools and communities and to see the places and spaces around them through a new lens.

Where might you find mathematics in urban places and spaces?

~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

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

cross-district meeting: November 9 2021

Educators from across six districts gathered on Zoom after school on November 9 to re-connect and share a little around how each district planned to take up this professional inquiry project this year.

Some districts are looking at revitalizing this project in their districts while others have a specific inquiry question developed related to our overall focus on story and math. Examples include investigating math and story in everyday experiences, storytelling on the land inspiring emergent experiences in mathematics, the use of data to tell a story of place or community and connecting math, materials and the outdoors.

We discussed and shared ideas about some big ideas related to connecting story and math.

We brainstormed different ways to connect and think together through this professional inquiry project and used mentimeter.com to collect "votes" from those attending. The following is how the group thought we should concentrate our group's efforts this year:

So look forward to some upcoming events and projects! Information will be posted on this site or you could contact your district contact for this project.

Slides from our meeting can be viewed here:

Download BCRIM_November_2021

~Janice

Reggio Children Online Atelier: Mosaic of Marks

On October 28, I set my alarm for 5:30am to be up and ready for another live online atelier experience from Reggio Children in Italy. This atelier was focused on a Mosaic of Marks, Words and Materials and we were asked to gather mark making tools and surfaces in preparation.

The atelieristas shared some of their thinking and then asked us to select four mark making materials and four surfaces and to just spend some time investigating those materials sensorially before making any marks. We were then invited to share three concepts or ideas that came to mind as we explored the materials. Two of my words were connections and residue. 

We were then invited to begin mark making, thinking about the concepts and ideas that were inspired by the materials. I played with the idea of connecting circles and spirals and the different residues left by the tools on different surfaces.

The atelieristas watched as we used the materials and providing feedbacks and prompts to provoke our thinking and nudge our investigations in a deeper or new way. I was reminded of the importance of providing learners (adults, children, etc) with time to immerse themselves with ideas and materials.

The Vancouver Reggio Association, in collaboration with NAREA, will be hosting Reggio Children's Mosaic of marks exhibit here in Vancouver, beginning in the fall of 2022.

~Janice

 

Northwest Mathematics Conference 2021

The Northwest Mathematics Conference is being held virtually this year instead of at Whistler. The BCAMT hosts this conference every three years, alternating with Washington and Oregon. Our BC Reggio-Inspired Mathematics Project is happy to be sharing some of our work together in a session called "Learning Mathematics Outdoors and Through Stories" featuring Lauren MacLean from Coquitlam and Michelle Hikida from Richmond. Outdoor learning and storytelling has been an area of professional inquiry with our group for the last few years. 

 

The theme of the conference this year is CONNECTING which is such an important part of the pedagogy of The Reggio Emilia Approach. We can think about mathematical connections - math to self, math to world and math to math as ways to create meaning for learning mathematics. Connections between colleagues across districts, provinces and countries also inspires new ways of thinking about teaching and learning. We are looking forward to connecting with teachers on Friday, October 22!

 

You can find more information on the conference website HERE.

Thanks to all the teachers from across Canada that attended our session on Friday. The recording will be available till Nov 14 and information will be emailed to you about how to access it from the BCAMT.

Slides we shared are here:

Download NWMATH_BCRIM_2021

Download HIkida_Northwest_Math_Conference_Oct2021

Download What math lives outdoors.pptx

~Janice

Reggio Children Virtual Atelier: Geometries of Paper

On June 18, I attended a virtual/digital atelier with atelieristas from Reggio Children in Reggio Emilia Italy. This atelier was titled: "The poetics of paper between geometries and transformations" which intrigued me. It was amazing be with educators from all around the world, playing with materials and ideas together. I represented BC with my friend and colleague and BCAMT president Sue Robinson from Salt Spring Island where she is a secondary math teacher. 

The ateliers are interactive and you are sent a list of suggested materials and tools to have prepared. This is how I had my dining room table set up for the 6am PST start (time zones!!). 

The two hours went by so quickly and when I reflected on this, it was because the majority of the time I was so immersed in investigating paper and seeing what I could make it do as I thought about shapes, size and symmetry. The atelieristas invited us to tilt our laptops at 45degrees so they could see what we were doing with our hands and materials. It was intrigued by playing with the idea of transformation which I think paper is such an excellent material to use for this. I ripped, cut, and folded different papers to transform them, often focusing on 2D to 3D transformation. 

What mathematical connections might you make as you play with paper? What are the possibilities of paper for thinking about mathematics? What memories and stories does paper evoke for you? What metaphors do some shapes hold for you?

I am looking forward to hosting a paper atelier with teachers and/or students this fall!

E-Learning opportunities with Reggio Children can be found HERE.

~Janice