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Welcome to the BC Reggio-Inspired Mathematics Project Book Club for 2024-2025. Selected by educators in our network, we will be reading Cultivating Mathematical Hearts: Culturally Responsive Mathematics Teaching in Elementary Classrooms by Maria del Rosario Zavala and Julia Maria Aguirre.

This book was selected due to its alignment with Reggio-inspired principles and practices, with a focus on honouring children's thinking, funds of knowledge, and centering culture and identity.

It is available through Corwin in both paperback and electronic formats.

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We launched this year's book club this afternoon via Zoom with educators from across the province and a guest from Ontario. We discussed the authors' key purposes, principles and definitions and their Cultural Responsive Mathematics Teaching Tool. Slides are shared on our blog!

~Janice

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During our book club launch, we looked at a routine described in the book called Mathematizing the World. More information and some examples are available through this website.

~Janice

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Mathematizing the World Routine – Advancing Equity and Strengthening Teaching through Elementary Mathematical Modeling

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Mathematizing the World Routine Planning Tools

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I used an image of fall squashes from a market close to the school that I was teaching at. Many of the students in the grades 2&3 class were familiar with the market as they visited there with their families and commented on having seen all the pumpkins and squashes. As suggested in the book with the instructional activity "Mathematizing the World" on page 67, we asked the students to "notice, wonder, and connect". The children had many questions including where the pumpkins came from. This is the question I drew upon as we further discussed who else these questions might matter to and we discussed where are food comes from and the local farms in our community.

~Janice

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Are your students talking about the fires in Los Angeles? Is this bringing up connections for them about the wildfires we have been experiencing in BC and how those fires affect different communities? Where might there be opportunities for numeracy tasks or using mathematics to think about fires and their impact? What connections are students making to climate change? What data can you draw upon to support their questions and understanding?

The above map is a wildfire tracking map from the government of BC and can be found here: https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map

~Janice

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Many families in our community will be celebrating lunar new year later in January. The above two books are ones I have used to inspire numeracy tasks with primary students. Many students make connections to their families' traditions and celebrations.

~Janice

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This book has challenged me to connect with families in a new way. Last fall many children in my class were preparing for Diwali and excited to wear their traditional outfits to our school celebration. I spoke with children and families who volunteered to share photos and stories about their child's outfits. As a class we looked at the photos and collected noticings and wonderings. Finally, we looked again with a mathematical mind. It became apparent that there was much interest in the idea of time because they noticed the child had shorter hair and looked younger.

How long ago was this picture taken?

How much has she grown?

How tall is she now?

Does the outfit still fit?

How long did the outfit take to make?

After sharing the thinking with families I noticed an increased engagement and connection with families and children who are bringing ideas forward to investigate. We are continuing with more invitations to families and prompts from our community.

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I have been working on connecting math to our place and the grade one science curriculum. I wanted the students to understand that the times the sun rises and the sun sets are slightly different every day, and the days are getting longer. We started to look up the times for sunrise and sunset using the Weather app. At first, we just discussed the increases in minutes each day and then started charting the information. Students notice how many minutes of daylight are gained each day.

Prompts include:

How many minutes of daylight do you think we will gain today? Why do you think that?

What is the difference in daylight between today and yesterday?

Are we noticing an increasing or decreasing pattern in daylight?

How many minutes of daylight are gained after a weekend?

We are still working on many of these prompts, and I hope our learning will continue to deepen with more time and discussion.

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We had a lovely conversation with Maria and Julia at our book club session on Zoom on January 16. I have emailed the link and passcode to the Zoom recording to our secure network email lists. It will be available for 30 days.

~Janice

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This is the website Dr. Julia Aguirre shared during our book club session that focuses on mathematical modeling. We have mathematical modeling as a curricular competency in our BC curriculum but unfortunately the elaborations for it our incorrect and the Ministry of Ed has not yet updated those elaborations to reflect what mathematical modeling actually is. This is also closely connected to what we refer to as numeracy here in BC.

~Janice

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I noticed lots of my students were very curious about the changing weather, especially the frosty mornings!

We decided to track the weather each day data each day on our calendar and then add it to a weather data sheet.

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I took a picture of a Walmart shelf that had a lunar new year display and did a notice and wonder!

Many students were excited to share their estimations on how many items were on the shelf.

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We were inspired by the book Tray of Togetherness. Students drew their items and counted the items on the tray.

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While on a nature walk at a local park, the children were interested in this wild patch of flowers. I took a photo and we did an open notice and wonder in the classroom the next day.

What we noticed:

-the flowers are like stars in a constellation; they can be connected to make letters and shapes

-some flowers don't have petals and are leaning

-some plants are brown and dying and some are green

What we wondered:

-Are the flowers dying?

-Is there enough water?

-How many plants are growing and dying?

-What are the plants further back brown?

-Is there more sunlight up front?

-How many different plants are there?

-What do the flowers smell like?

We then identified which of our notice and wonder statements were connected to mathematics and in what ways. We identified the topics of shapes, counting, volume, fractions, measurement and area.

The children were most interested in shapes, so we read Jane Yolen's book "Shape Me a Rhyme: Nature's Forms in Poetry".

We were inspired and wondered what shapes we could find in nature. We predicted what shapes would be common and more easily found, and what shapes would be least likely identified. We investigated by revisiting the park and recorded what we saw in our nature journals.

Please see in comment section for what the children recorded.

We then made a class tally of the shapes we recorded and practiced our graphing skills.

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Students have been learning about salmon and its connection to Richmond's fishing history. During a field trip to the Gulf of Georgia Cannery Museum, they also explored other fish found in our waters. Many students were surprised to discover the size of some fish, which sparked their interest and curiosity. This led to questions about how large these fish can grow, what two meters looks like, and the length of a halibut.

Upon returning to the classroom, students chose a specific fish to investigate further. They used iPads to research the appearance and actual size of their chosen fish. Using various materials, students then created models representing the actual size of the fish.

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Students are beginning to explore Financial Literacy. We read the story, Balancing Act I showed them a shell, 5 rocks and 10 sticks. We explored how to balance both sides of the scale. We talked about values and different things have different values.

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Our Grade 3/4 class was working on telling time and we had an upcoming field trip that we were going to use public transit for so I thought this could be a good opportunity for them to reflect on the importance of public transit in our community, but also as a way for them to think about all the variables and considerations one needs to think about when planning a trip.

We started off by reading "Last Stop on Market Street" as a way to ground our thinking about questions like:

•Who uses the bus?

• How does it help our community?

We then connected this to our upcoming trip:

• Why don’t we just take cars for our field trip?

-   Not everyone’s parents can take time off

-   Not everyone has a car

• Why don’t we just take a big yellow bus?

-  Expensive

-  Not worth it for such a short trip

• Why would kids 12 and under be free?

-  They don’t have $

-  They don’t have jobs

-   They need an adult to pay for them and adults don’t want to pay for that many people

-  Kids under 12 cannot be left at home

-  Not fair/equitable for adults to have to pay extra just because they have kids

-  If 2 people need to go to the doctor, the person with kids shouldn’t have to pay more just because they have kids

Then we started to have some exploration time with the Google Trip Planner (I forgot it also estimates the walk time for them, so I wish we had a talk about estimating time first).

Made sure we understood how to use the app and then had them tell me what time they thought we should leave, and why. JUSTIFY their choice.

We brainstormed together all the possible things that could impact our time:

-              Traffic

o   Construction

o   People turning

o   Slow cars

o   Accidents

-              Poor light timing

-              Walking speed

-              Bathroom breaks

-              Missed buses

-              Late/early buses

-              Full buses

-              Time to sign in at our destination

In the end I complied the students' top 3 times and routes and then had them pick which one they would select and WHY.

I think this has the potential to move into discussions about how much more time and energy people who cannot afford a vehicle have to put into their trips and planning. That is, they cannot “get up and go” when they like – they have to go with the transit schedule and it takes them longer to get places. Also sometimes it’s harder to do the right thing for our planet and we may need to be inconvenienced to help do our part and take care of the earth.

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Our class read "I want 100 Dogs" by Stacy McAnulty and posed a lot of wonders about the time, space, and cost of having so many dogs. I used their wonders (and did a bit of research) to create problems for the students to solve.

For Example:

Bobina has 90 dogs.

She can walk a maximum of 6 dogs at a time safely.

a) How many times will she need to go for a walk so that each dog gets at least 1 walk today?

b) How many walks will she need to take in a week (7 days)?

c) How many in a month (30 days)?

The students progressed through the problems at their own pace and utilized a variety of strategies to solve them. Many of them extended the problems to go further (e.g. How many walks in a year? If each walk takes 15 minutes, how much time would that take?).

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Inspired by similar community-based backgrounds seen in the schools in Reggio Emilia that I shared with the Richmond book club, I printed large colour photos (on white cardstock) of landscapes from our local walks to the west dyke. These will be backgrounds or backdrops to math stories connected to the land and place.

~Janice