This week's introduction resonated with me based on the challenges of teaching math to middle schoolers who have for so long seen it as a separate and rigid subject area. I've tried to incorporate activities all year long that allow students to see the mathematics in a variety of places and spaces, and see and experience mathematics as an interconnected subject.
I love the idea of integrating math with artistic and cultural elements so I shared this week's activity of viewing the Bridges galleries and reproducing a piece of "math art" with my Grade 6's. Listening to the conversations and watching students explore the galleries I could tell that it was engaging and intriguing for students - many of them went on to explore some of the other years as well.
The whole point of activities like these is to approach math through a more holistic and interconnected lens and I think in this case students were able to see something a little bit different. As you can see in picture 3 attached, one student even took the idea from the Bridges gallery and "extended" it, connecting his hexagons all the way to the edge of the page.
Another student not pictured, because I ended up getting his face in the picture, drew his own version of the "pi maze" and then his friend added the digits of pi around the outside. This gave me a great idea of having one student start a piece of mathematical artwork and then randomly hand it off to someone else to have them extend and complete it. Math-Art Mash-Up Monday, perhaps?
I am really enjoying reading about your experiences with these activities in middle school. You brought up a very interesting point around, "the challenges of teaching math to middle schoolers who have for so long seen it as a separate and rigid subject area." This is something that I am really enjoying exploring with my grade 1/2 students through this course, as they have no previous ideas about mathematics. However, I have found the activities more difficult to adapt to younger children.
ReplyDeleteI absolutely love your ideas of collaborative math art! I am excited to hear how that works in your classroom when you try it.
I really enjoyed really this post! It actually made me very excited to get back to work after my maternity leave and start trying some of these things out in my 7/8 math classes. I'd be interested to see how they handle an activity like this as they're notoriously rigid in their math experiences and i'd love to get them out of that mind set. Your idea about a collaborative math art piece is super interesting and I hope you try it out and let us know how it works! I also really enjoyed that you provided them with the website and let them pick what they wanted to do, so much creativity comes from open-ended activities like this one.
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