Tuesday Sept 21st Math Club

[kidc...@gmail.com]

Reality is perspective.

Between last week and this week's class, A was asked to do a narration
picture of a chapter in Winnie the Pooh. While drawing Pooh's house,
A, for the first time, drew three connected squares [ ][ ][ ] and
told me "it goes like this and not like this" as he held his hands in
a 90 degree angle and then flat. He was trying to convey that Pooh's
house was 3D but he didn't know how to draw it. Prior to last week's
math club (and the book they read) he had always drawn flat 2D and
never attempted to show depth.

This weeks club began with free drawing where B drew a "black
hole" (circle spiraling smaller) and then A & B discussed if the
drawing was 1D, 2D, or 3D which related back to last weeks reading of
a book on the same topic. B said he could make it 3D if he had
scissors which tells me he has a good grasp of the concept. He
started to cut on the line and he tried to get everyone to notice how
he could pull it into a cone based spiral but everyone had moved on to
more "reality talk". The question was posed is the picture of Avatar
"ON" A's shirt real? It's 3D because you can pick up the shirt yet
not because you cannot pick up the drawing off the shirt...

The next assignment was to draw stars.. taking last club's activity
with the straws from 3D objects to 2D drawings. B drew several
different designs including bunches of rays coming off the same point,
a double triangle star, and a circle with a zigzag line drawn around
it. A drew a random selection of dots and then worked on connecting
them. LBA drew curve based squiggles. D drew a base triangle with
additional smaller triangles added on the edges to form spikes. Each
child (not L) incorporated triangles in how they drew a star yet no
two methods were alike. L while looking at a magnetics star (magnetic
sphere with 6 equi-distance rays extending from it) drew a circle with
4 fairly evenly spaced rays extending from it with smaller circles at
the end of the rays. E helped L then draw a hand-print star (two
tracings of a hand with the palms overlapped and fingers sets opposite
each other). LBA then drew a triangle with D shaped lumps added to the
three sides and a circle with many small rays extending from it
(looked almost hairy).

Everyone was handed scissors and asked to cut the individual stars out
of the bigger pages. Then Maria asked open-ended questions guiding
the kids to group together stars that had similar characteristics...
triangles, polygons, rays, dots, etc. While we were doing this D used
her scissors to cut out a triangle shape on a fold creating a type of
3D 2pt star. That morphed into what other shapes can you cut on a
fold to create a star shape. Zig-zag.. bumps.. etc. B cut a shape
but did not put it on the fold line and ended up with two separate
shapes. Another child cut out a zig-zag based shape and noticed that
the negative space on the larger piece of paper also made a star.. a
"hole" star if you will...

Snack time involved cutting apple circles into star shapes with the
kids telling Maria where to cut and if it resulted in a star or
another shape. Someone pointed out the natural five point star-shape
in the seed placement in the apple core when cut crosswise.

After snacks, we did the ball bouncing activity (Small ball dipped in
food-color water, rolled on paper so that it bounced against the wall
leaving angles and rays that you could see because of the colored
water drips and lines) When repeated a bunch of times the angles
created actually started to form partial stars.. they were incomplete
because the paper did not reach all the way to the other baseboard and
we couldn't bounce off the other wall. The kids seemed to enjoy it
but struggled to wait patiently for their turn with the one ball.
This activity, while fun, did not directly tie into the star theme.

Then we went outside and created a large star by connecting 6 kids
together using string. Each child had 5 strings tied to a wrist.
When all the strings pulled tight it formed a very nice star within a
hexagon. Maria then came back thru and disconnected neighbors which
eliminated the hexagon aspect and let the star points show stronger.
I was amazed at the level of interest shown by the kids in watching
the star being made with all the connection points and also the
patience for all the knot tying!

My sincerest apologies for how late this is! I hope everyone was able
to understand what I wrote despite my not being able to actually draw
the various illustrations that I had in my handwritten notes.

Thanks!

[Maria Droujkova]

Thank you for a great description, Cindy!

Here is the slide show with the pictures from our meeting:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26208371@N06/tags/naturalmathclub09212010/show/

The flow was a bit rough that day. We discussed it shortly afterward. I agree with parents who said that there was too much openness for some tasks, and kids did not have a strong sense of purpose, as a result.

I also would add more roleplay to the star part. I mean, stars are so romantic! We are going to listen to the "Starry night" song today and watch the movie about modeling it in Second Life. Maybe it will help.

Cheers,
Maria Droujkova

Make math your own, to make your own math.

[Michèle Drechsler]

Hello

I am in France. I'm looking for work, experiences, research has been conducted on the subject of building the number in kindergarten. (From 3 to 6 years). Thank you for your help.

Kind regards
Michèle Drechsler
Inspectrice de l'éducation nationale

[MrSteve]

Michèle,

I would point you to the work of Lore Rasmussen who did some excellent
work as part of the new Math movement back in the early 60's. Her
Miquon books are a good resource (http://www.keypress.com/x6252.xml)

Of particular interest may be her First Grade Diary and Lab Sheet
Annotations.

Stephen

On Sep 28, 7:52 pm, Michèle Drechsler <michele.drechs...@gmail.com>
wrote: