Better Mathematical Eyesight: Beauty, Pattern and Form
Mustard Seed School
Community Room, 7pm
In its simplest statement, our plan for the evening is to discuss the connection between these activities in Early Childhood classes:
and this piece of work done by Eight Grade algebra students:
To connect the dots, Mrs. Pargellis and Nathan Johnson are gathering photos and videos that show the role of block building and tessellations in the earliest grades. These activities are highly quantitative, and help children think about beauty, pattern, form, number, scale, symmetry and perspective.
Jenn Paffenroth and a few of her students will share some work done by Second Graders. They will demonstrate lessons relating to factors with blocks and manipulatives; other work will be shown using paper and pencil. What do children "see" through these two different forms? What patterns emerge?
Melissa McCallihan has lined up some Thunder and Lightning students to share a classic problem from math history -- Pascal's Triangle. (see the blog posts of January 27, 2015). Patterns? You bet. Stand back and see what the students have found!
Then three teams of middle school students will share solutions they prepared in response to thought-provoking problems. Two teams will show solutions to the Bathtub problem (blog post from January 9). These teams conceived of the problem in very different ways. The final team will show the solution to the Paper Folding problem (blog post of February 4), which generated the graph above. The graph is a way to "see" the numerical relationships -- the patterns -- implicit in the problem.
Come and see what the students are doing!
You can RSVP right now! Let us know you are coming: RSVP for March 12
