Image of the Week: Welcome Back!
August 14, 2022
Welcome Back!
Welcome back for the start of the 2022-23 school year! Here at multiplicity lab we’ve spent the summer building many new activities for you and your students and creating new resources that we’ll be sharing with over the coming weeks and months.
If you are preparing for a new school year, make us part of your plans! Include Look-Think-Talk activities at the beginning of every lesson – or even as a whole lesson – to help students learn what it means to do mathematics. Welcome your students back with images that will spark wonder and communicate that in mathematics, it is multiplicity that matters! Students need practice to learn to share their thinking, take risks, develop multiple ways of seeing and thinking, and pose questions.
Take a look at our image of the week. How many do you see? Regardless of the age of your students, this question can open up a variety of conversations about both what students are counting and how they are counting them. For instance, students might count a particular color of paint, the number of paint trays, or the total number of paint circles. And they might count these by using one-to-one counting, subitizing and skip counting, thinking in equal groups of rows or columns, or connecting area and multiplication.
To capture even more of your students’ ideas, bring them up to the projector to point out exactly what they noticed and how they thought. Consider providing them with printouts of the pdf version of this task that they can annotate to show how they counted, decomposed, and or used its structure.
The key in facilitating the discussion of this image is to be enthusiastic and curious about all of students’ ways of thinking, seeing, and communicating. Especially at the beginning of the school year, these conversations set the tone that there are many ways to make sense and communicate your thinking – and that each will be celebrated in your classroom!
And we invite you to follow us on Twitter! Tweet us the fascinating ideas you students have about our activities or how you’re trying these activities in your space. We can’t wait to hear from you!
To multiplicity, cheers!
Jen Munson and the multiplicity lab group