Sunday 26 May 2019

What's been happening in Maths?


We have been exploring a number of concepts in Maths in the last few weeks, and all of them have been revolving around the idea that Maths is a creative and open subject.  Speed is not the priority, but rather critical and creative thinking, listening, trying and justifying your thinking are. 

We've explored these overarching ideas through the contexts of shapes, patterns, sorting, graphing, and much more.  

These guys are working in partners to come up with different ways to sort the different coloured shapes.  Some sorted them by shapes with straight edges while others simply by colour.  


We are sorting emojis.  Some of us sorted them by eyebrows and no eyebrows, others by open mouths and closed mouths and others by happy and sad faces.   What we realised is that there are so many different ways to do it, but they have to have something in common and you have to be able to justify your ideas. 



Many of us have been expanding our mathematical creativity and thinking into our discovery time.  We have been using the shapes to create patterns, to sort and to make pictures.  We have also been practising working out our own number problems.  We've even started using patterns in numbers to help us solve bigger problems.  For example: I know 2+2=4, so I can figure out 20 + 20 because it's just 2 groups of 10 + 2 groups of 10 which is 4 groups of 10, which is 40! 



We have also been exploring how mathematical information can be shared and presented.  We explored creating our own graphs showing a continuum of our least favourite of something to our most favourite.  We talked about how the line could have numbers along it and if it did, the least favourite would be closest to zero and the most favourite closest to 10.  Lots of us started by ranking our preference of colours.




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