Image of the Week: Welcome Back! 2025-26

Welcome Back! 2025-26

Welcome back for the start of the 2025 – 26 school year! Here at multiplicity lab we’ve spent the summer building many new activities for you and your students and creating some new features we’ll introduce in a few weeks.

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.

Try launching one of your first math lessons with a notice and wonder activity using this image or any of the Notice & Wonder images on our website. What’s wonderful about these activities, especially at the beginning of a new year, is that they are not about finding the right answer. Instead, they open up space for students to see, think, interpret, and pose questions, and there are an infinite number of ways to do that, which means every child can contribute and be heard.

Take a look at the image of the week. What could students notice and wonder? You can try this with children of any age and depending on the grade and their experience, they might notice some of these features:

• There are many hot air balloons!
• Each balloon looks different.
• The balloons aren’t smooth like the ones we can hold in our hands. These have ribs or ridged.
• The balloons are round at the top and get narrow at the bottom.
• There are people in the baskets under the balloons.
• Each balloon has a pattern.
• Some of the patterns go in circles or rings around the balloons.
• Some of the patterns are vertical stripes.
• Some of the patterns seem to twist around the balloons.
• The patterns are made of different shapes: rectangles, parallelograms, triangles, and other shapes.

Building on these observations, students might then pose questions like:

• How many balloons are there in this picture?
• Where was this picture taken? Why were all these balloons there? Where are they going?
• How many balloons were there in all – even those we cannot see?
• How many people are in the baskets?
• Are all of the balloons patterned?
• How do people design the patterns on balloons?
• How big are hot air balloons? How tall and wide?
• How high in the air are these balloons? How high can they go?

You can see that in just one conversation, you might delve into measurement, structure, estimation, counting, patterning, and geometry. You can just wonder with your students or use this conversation to spur further investigation. Consider giving students printouts of the pdf version of this activity so they can annotate it with the different patterns they see or use the size of the people to estimate other measurements.

The point is that every child can cultivate a sense of mathematical wonder if we make space for in the classroom. What better time than now?

To multiplicity, cheers!

Jen Munson and the multiplicity lab group