Week of Inspirational Math

Amy Wix

Teacher at Kasson-Mantorville Middle School

MCTM District 1 Director

I utilized Jo Boaler’s Week Of Inspirational Math during the second week of school to continue our discussion on growth mindset.  We completed a different activity each day.  The first day’s activity was Four 4’s.  I’ve done this before with my students as a review lesson for order of operations.  I really like how every student in the class was able to do at least some of the problems.  I especially liked how the students persevered the whole class period trying to solve the problems.  I challenged the students to complete the task for numbers up to 20 within the next few days. One student was very frustrated with the task.  She came to work with me at CP (an after school tutoring program).  At first she was really negative and I would give her some prompts to get going.  After a few of them you could see the light bulb go off and she caught on to solving them.  I still had to help her with few, but she was able to finish the task that afternoon.  When she was done, she packed up her stuff and said to me, “I just have to give you a hug!”  I could have given her the answers when she was showing the frustration, and maybe in my former years as a teacher I would have a little sooner.  This idea that you need to struggle to learn is new for the students and difficult to balance as a teacher.  The hug she gave me was similar to the hug I got last year from a student at Eagle Bluff.  I was encouraging her to take one more step on the ropes course.  I could see she didn’t want to quit, but she couldn’t move forward.  I offered to come up and walk through with her and she was able to make it through the course.  Funny, I didn’t want my student to give up on that challenge.  Shouldn’t it be the same with a math struggle?

   Day 2‘s activity was one of my favorites.We watched the intro video together and then I distributed the handouts.  I asked the students what they noticed, wondered and if they could see any patterns. I passed around some crayons and invited the students to color code as the saw patterns.  Most of them saw that the 3’s were all triangles rather quickly.  With a few more of the “what do you notice” questions some of the students were able to see the circles made prime numbers.  I was able to see how well students remembered some of their math vocabulary from 5th grade when terms like prime, composite, factors, etc. were being discussed in their groups.

Day 3 we used the Dot Card Number Talk at the beginning.  It was interesting to watch other students as they listened to their peers explain how they saw the patterns.  All three classes came up with patterns not seen in other groups. We then worked on the paper folding activity.  I found it interesting that this was the activity the students were most willing to give up on after only one or two tries.  Promoting the practice of persevering is going to be a theme this year!

Day 4 was Pascal’ Triangle.  This was a perfect Friday activity.  The students were really engaged; especially the students needing the low floor. They were quick to find patterns.  The discussion about triangular numbers went well as a followup to the discussion we had earlier in the week about square numbers.

Day 5  Growing Shapes was an awesome activity that included a number talk (how do you see the pattern growing?) and it also helped introduce the concept of translating between patterns tables and graphs.  I hope to extend these activities with the Fawn Nguyen visualpatterns.org   

Jo Boaler and her team did an excellent job with the Week of Inspirational Math activities.  My poor students are stuck with me for inspiration the remainder of the year!