Day 56: Getting Creative in Math

Mrs. Boate is the Innovation Resource Teacher for Numeracy K-8 with the SCDSB.

I invited her to join our class so she might demonstrate a creative and inquisitive approach to math concepts.

Math is typically an area that is seen as procedural, methodical and 'by the book'.

When most people think of math class in school, they think of following a set of pre-ordained steps, finding out the answer, and practicing questions over and over.

And yet...that does not have to be the case!

Our topic today was an introduction to graphing and data management.

To get our 'minds on' this new topic, and to access previous knowledge, Mrs. Boate posted a bar graph that had just bars and asked: what could this be about? Student brainstormed ideas, recalling previous graphs and survey subjects.

Then she asked: what is missing? Students remembered that graphs needs labels and scales and titles.

We then checked out this awesome site: Graphing Stories 

We looked at the Costa Rica swing video--but not past the point where we saw the swing portrayed as a graph because we wanted the students to try graphing it themselves.

Students had to creatively interpret the real life scenario into a mathematical (graphical) representation of their own devising.

This brought forth some interesting discussion on estimation of height, the shape the graph might take, marking the time for lowest point & highest point, etc.

We then compared student graphs to the graph in the video.

We will definitely be using this site again to explore graphing scenarios!

Mrs. Boate will be joining out class again in December for more graphing fun.

Thank you for visiting our class, Mrs. Boate!

*reposted from my class blog: http://mrsjohnsonintermediate.blogspot.ca/
*I'm a Grade 8 teacher at Shanty Bay PS. I love introducing creativity, tech and media into my classroom.
*on Twitter @julieejohnsonn