Week 5

 Week 5 Article Summary 

First off apologies to Amanda and Patrick for not replying to your posts last week. Life and work unexpectedly got away from me. 

Movement-based Mathematics: Enjoyment and Engagement without Compromising Learning through the EASY Minds Program. Riley et al. (2017).

Four grade 5 and 6 Australian classrooms participated in a six week physical and mathematical intervention program, Encouraging Activity to Stimulate Young Minds (EASY minds).  Two types of math lessons were used. One used physical activity as the platform to develop procedural fluency and the other focused on moving around and looking at the mathematics around the school. 

Researchers sought both student and teacher perceptions of the intervention. 6 of 66 students went on to participate in a detailed student focus group. Students particularly enjoyed rotating activities like hop-skip-jump and recording and determining averages. Student enjoyment was a common result, student comment “I like doing sport and being active and when you combine that with maths it makes it much more enjoyable” (p. 1660).

Here is one activity example (p. 1661): 

I had a pre-stop, before reading the article. Would there be a balance? As Susan Gerofsky says in the introduction,  don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. After the intervention, do math lessons involve a mix of “regular” learning and learning similar to the EASY minds program? It appears so in some cases. “Many students reported more hands-on activities since involvement in the program, and many reported that their teacher was now more innovative using varied and interesting activities to improve their learning.” (p. 1662) 

Furthermore, engagement in math went up. Teachers were able to harness this engagement  during the more traditional learning. One teacher reported more students now attempting written and explicit work. Many students said they found math easier when they returned to the classroom. 

There were some negative comments, such as when the physical goal of the activity was hard to achieve. Example, throwing a bean bag into a hoop could prove difficult/frustrating and distract from the math. 

Week 5 Activity 

I decided to do base 4 as the extension. Then I wanted to explore perfect squares. First showing 4 and 16 in base 4. Which are 10 and 100 in base 10. The “1s” being red. Is it a coincidence that 4 and 16 are perfect squares and have one solid red ring? What about others?

Finally showing the product of identical factors in base 4 to see what a “perfect square” might look like. 36 and 49 both had a red ring but they also contained a white ring and the other color from the factors. 

Idea - Number can be represented in expanded exponential form. Ex: 342 = 2x100 + 4x101 + 3x102

Guiding Questions - How can we represent this in a more advanced place value chart?

Thousands 103	Hundreds - 102	Tens - 101	Ones - 100
	3	4	2

The Story - A place value chart is a linear/grid method to display a number. It aligns the same way we write numbers.  It shows powers of ten or ones, tens, hundreds. It is kind of arbitrary. We could use nested circles to display place value in base 10. 

Integrating art based activities - Color code the digits 0 to 9. The colors now represent the amount of one, tens, hundreds, etc… Choose one color and make as many numbers as you can. Ex: 2, 22, 222 would all be the same color but different number of shaded circles. 

Possible Extension - Extend this to base 9 (or powers of 9) What do your numbers look like now? Do the same thing for base 11.