Image of the Week: ¿Cuántos? Quantos? How many?

¿Cuántos? Quantos? How many?

Our Teacher Advisory Board has great ideas about how we can make multiplicity lab better for students and teachers, and today we are introducing one of their best ideas yet. If you teach in linguistically diverse classrooms, facilitating discourse around mathematics – the heart of learning – can be even more challenging. One of the reasons we love our visual approach is that regardless of students’ home language, they have access to seeing the mathematics. But to engage with the image, students need to understand the focal question – what’s being asked of the image. Our website and materials are in English, and this can be a barrier for students who are actively learning to read, listen, or speak in English or for those who are learning mathematics in a language other than English.

To build better access to our Look-Think-Talk activities, we now offer pdf versions in Spanish (Latin America) and Portuguese (Brazil) for you to download and print for any students who might benefit from seeing the focal question in one of these languages.

Simply inviting children to look for patterns in this domino image – or one of the other domino pattern images on our website – can open up dozens of diverse observations. Every student can enter a task like this, and the longer you dwell on these patterns, the more students will notice. Why does this matter? Pattern-seeking and looking for structure are at the heart of what it means to do mathematics. Too often when we engage students in thinking about patterns, the patterns we show are simplistic or we have a specific pattern we want students to notice. Opening up pattern-seeking allows students to see that, in patterned spaces, there are likely to be many layered patterns and many ways to describe those patterns.

These images invite several follow-up questions:

• How could we describe the pattern you noticed?
• How could we represent the patterns you noticed?
• Why does this pattern exist?
• Where could you add onto this pattern? What would you add on? Why?

Whether you have very young students, whose observations focus on the counting sequence and sums of the individual dominoes, or much older students ready to tackle describing and extending their patterns, exploring domino patterns will give you and your students lots to talk about.

To multiplicity, cheers!

Jen Munson and the multiplicity lab group