Image of the Week: Off You Go! Summer Edition

Off You Go! Summer Edition

Alongside our amazing Look-Think-Talk activities, we offer another routine that we’ve shared in past: Off You Go. In Off You Go, you show students an image that represents a concept that they have seen before but one where they can still deepen their understanding. This could be a number, shape, pattern, structure, or relationship. You invite them to notice this concept in the image and then you send them off to find examples of that concept in their environment that they can bring back to share and discuss.

What’s truly amazing is what happens when students bring back their examples. They might take photos, bring objects, draw sketches, or make lists, but no matter how they collect their examples, the class creates a museum of the many ways the mathematical concept can look. The collections your class assembles can tell you a lot about how they are understanding the concept, and where their thinking is stretching – or needs to be.

Take, for example, this simple image of a staircase. It is packed with patterns, and if students can recognize these patterns, they can seek out patterns wherever they find themselves – something mathematicians do.  This is especially important as we get ready to send our students off for summer. This is our final Image of the Week for the 2023 – 24 school year. Go ahead – congratulate yourself. You made it through another year. And now, just as we talked about last week when looking at the aerial image of a city intersection, what we can do for our students is position them to see and explore their own worlds mathematically even when we are not with them. We can challenge them to notice and wonder. We can, with this Off You Go, encourage them to look for patterns – everywhere, from the playgrounds we explored a few weeks ago to leaves on trees or shelves in the library. 

After you try this Off You Go with your students, ask them: Where do you think you might find patterns this summer? Where will you look? Maybe some of them will come back to you in August or September with a story to tell. Can you imagine the smile that would give you?

Now, off you go! We’ll see you in August!

(For our friends in the Southern hemisphere and those of you teaching over the summer, the Image of the Week archive provides a trove of activities to tide you over until August.)

To multiplicity, cheers!

Jen Munson and the multiplicity lab group