The Role of Mathematics in the PYP - Day 1

In November I had the pleasure of learning from Tania Mansfield on the Role of Mathematics in the PYP.

She told us from the very start that, explicitly the things we do in the workshop are things you can use in your classroom.  The live binder for example is where Tania shared all of the workshop documents. This seems to be similar to Edmodo but I prefer the Edmodo interface. One of the first strategies we were taught was to show fingers if we needed more time. She also reminded us to tell her if she is speaking too fast.

We introduced ourselves using Maths. Tania pointed out how the who we are unit, is at the start of the year. We introduced ourselves using mathematics: favorite number, height & birthday. Other ideas were: I have 3000 ruppeses in my wallet, impotent dates to me or I have flown xxx miles.

The Blob Tree below was used determine prior knowledge and how we were feeling.

Blob Tree

Session two began with Tony Ryan’s Thinker Keys. The Reverse Key - Think of something in life that is not a Math problem? Everything is related to Math. How we organize ourselves is a transdisciplinary theme that lends itself to Math. 

Wonder wall – What are we wondering? It is for the children to question and ask. Make sure you use it…

Wonder Wall

Lines of inquiry and summatice assessment criteria given at the start. We wrote our essential agreements through the PYP attitudes. EAs should be few in number, refer to things done, be positive, observable & agreed by everyone. We did a Think-Pair-Share 

Next we did Living Graphs to represent: the level you teach, years teaching the pyp, stand nearest to the strand you prefer, when you were in school how you felt at Math (3D). We also looked at Mathematical Glyphs - students make their faces using shapes. Biography Glyphs - Parents have to guess if no names are on there.

Living Graph

Next we did a C.O.R.I. - Collect Organise Represent Interpret. This activity had all five of the strands in it. We all had a sticker on our book. This determined who we would work with. It was another strategy for mixing up the class. There were always lots of resources on hand and we had to do a two minute presentation at the end. Everything was stuck up on the walls after the presentation. We learned from each others work and saw that our work was celebrated. A CORI could be used for creating a rubric. Visual dictionaries, could be used to support EAL students. We need to be sure whether we are checking for math understanding or language understanding. We played another  game with two coins called heads up. We had our hands on our heads or bottom while Tanya tossed a coin.

For our final session we were asked to come up with a definition of a Math learner. We played a game called place value bingo and then did some reading. We did the 3 Rs - Review, Remind, Reflect before going on to an activity where we were asked to estimate a length of string. People used a number of different strategies to guess the length of string. The point was that we all come into the activity with prior knowledge. 

Reading RRR - Review, Remind, Reflect

The day wrapped up with rocket writing - we had to reflect by writing for 3 mins. What a day!