Over the course of the year, students this class had opportunities to develop and share their mathematical thinking and strategies in response to different problems.
A student used a hundreds chart to solve an addition problem and shared his strategy with the class.
This lesson was based on the wordless picture book Chalk by Bill Thomas. In the story, everything that the children draw with magic chalk comes to life including a gigantic dinosaur. After reading the story, each child was given a “magic” piece of chalk and asked, “What stories will come to life when your chalk meets black paper?” After drawing their stories, each child had a turn to orally explain what their magic chalk had created. This student imagined that storybook heroes come to life and save her when she’s in trouble.
After reading the book Not a Box by Antoinette Portis, a class discussed all the different things a box could be. Students were given a choice of paper squares in different sizes, patterns, and colours that they could glue to a page and make into something else. The result became a class book.
A child decided to use the pantry in the kitchen centre as a parkade for all the toy cars and trucks from another centre. He combined other people’s ideas about play centres to create something new, and made it work. His idea was fun because it expanded the play possibilities for him and his friends within existing resources.
Students were given time for free exploration with the tool SMART notebook, and allowed to create anything they chose. This girl selected something important to her (her pink stuffy “Minnie”), took her own photo of her with Minnie, reversing the camera and importing the photo into the program, created a border and coloured it using the tools in the app, all independently. She was very proud of what she created and asked to put it on the SMARTboard to show her classmates.
In this storybook workshop, children generated ideas by choosing a provocation that had been set out by the teacher. Provocations for this lesson included art studio with watercolours, play dough, building blocks, plastic animals and loose parts (beads, empty spools), and collections of other artifacts. The children built, played, and made the story come alive in their actions and words.
A child was building a tower with building blocks and explaining what she was doing. The idea of adding houses was an imitation of something she had seen her older cousin do. Young children often imitate in order to build their skills and then get original ideas later.
This class was engaged in exploring 3D shapes as part of the Mathematics curriculum. The teacher gave them the story Changes, Changes by Pat Hutchin. In this wordless picture book, each page uses the same blocks to create different objects to tell a story. The students were then asked to create different objects with the exact same pieces of Lego. When they finished creating something using all their pieces, they took a picture with an iPad and then started again. They used the app Picollage to create the collages.
A Humanities class worked on determining the different perspectives of various stakeholder groups on the banning of all shark fin products in their city. Their community has a large traditional Chinese community and the ban is controversial. Students were taught about political cartoon devices and asked to create an original political cartoon that expressed one of the perspectives on the issue.
Students in a Technology Education class were asked to construct a functioning model construction crane like the ones dominating the skyline in their community.
This student and her group researched cranes online, did a design sketch, assembled materials, developed multiple versions of the design, tested component pieces, had to redesign a half-lap joint that proved too weak, and then built the crane. She incorporated a swivel scavenged from an old computer hard drive into the final design.