Math, Nature, Skype: A math class I am teaching
Math-Nature-Skype – the three elements of a Math class I started this week with four 8-11 year olds. My students live in Ojai, CA and go to school at Grounded by Nature. They spend three days of the week exploring in the boundless Ojai valley developing survival skills, learning music kinesthetically, reading and questioning the history of humankind and a variety of other topics related to human-nature connection. They experiment, work on a local farm, build fires, camp, rock-climb and surf. They also create visual art representations of what they observe. Two days of the week they focus on more classic academic skills like Language arts and Math. That's when I connect with them.
I meet my students over Skype. They sit in their yurt classroom, I in my study. We talk, use an electronic whiteboard, read the same books, play with the same manipulatives and tools. I have several hopes for this class, the greatest that we all learn to think mathematically. I hope we will see patterns, make connections, manipulate symbols, create abstracted representations of real phenomena. I have created a class ritual. In every session, we share an observation of "Math where you did not expect it."
Our sharings today included —
A raindrop hit the windshield and then another did too, following the same line of fall. This led us to talk about decribing the travel path of a flying object, how this relates to the launch of rocketships.
An esthetician pointed out to one of the students how eyebrow waxing involves math. She uses an approximation of the diameter of the face to determine the the shape of brows. It makes me wonder how we humans can see symmetry and asymmetry to easily.
Houses on one side of the street all have odd numbers and on the other have even numbers.
I shared my blouse. You can see it in the picture. It has a pattern of squares inside squares. This led us to talk about the square of a number.
In this first quarter of the year, the overall thematic focus is on the birth of human kind, the creation and evolution of human civilization, experiments and inventions that changed history. Tieing in with this theme, our Math explorations have begun with the History of Counting. We are reading a book by the same name. Our first stories are on body counting. We watched the video of a man from Papua New Guinea using Foe body counting. This inspired me to share how to learn the nine times table with two hands.
As the quarter and the year rolls, we will continue thematic studies, weaving in experiential math learning, observations and also book-based practice. My hope is that we will learn to think mathematically by using multiple modalities, making math relevant, meaningful, connected and also giving practice and skill development its due within this larger context. I am also excited to see how we see the beauty of math in the natural world. More in the weeks to come.