Learning Mathematical Skills in Preschool Through Play and Movement
Throughout the months of October and November, our Early Math team was focused on the ways children learn through play and the mathematics that emerge as teachers interact with children alongside their play. We took one of the activities we created and took it to 10 Head Start Preschool classrooms. Our goal was for the… Continue Reading
Episode 63 | The Connectedness of Mathematics with Rachel Horsman
In England at Cambridge there is a project underway that seeks to map and model the connected nature of school mathematics. Working on this project is a small but highly motivated team of researchers, teachers, mathematicians, and web-designers. Rachel Horsman is among these, she and Chris had an opportunity recently to sit down and discuss… Continue Reading
Student Autonomy – Facilitate It
Lately I’ve been thinking about learner autonomy. I myself evolved into an autonomous learner. Because I was a gifted athlete, I left home for my freshman year of high school to attend an athletic academy so I could become better at my sport. Along with athletic training at my new school came a new phenomenon:… Continue Reading
Do Teachers Really Teach?
Picture a beach along California’s beautiful coast with sand, sun, and a light breeze. Waves crash with regularity. Now imagine that one particular wave comes higher up the beach and splashes into a collection of driftwood. The effect of the wave on the wood depends on the wood’s weight, shape, and size. In short, the… Continue Reading
What Every Student Needs to Know for Multiplication (Part 6)
***This is part 6 of a series. Click the links to go back and read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5*** In the latest series of blog posts by the Coordinating Units team, we explored our recent work in the classroom developing multiplicative reasoning with students. One area that we… Continue Reading
The First Picture Is Not The Only Picture
I have just returned from the 2017 National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. More than 6,000 early care and education (ECE) teachers for 0-8 year olds convened at the Georgia Congress Convention Center. My colleague Aileen Rizo and I were honored to represent the AIMS Center for Math… Continue Reading
Towards Risk-Tolerant Learning
Recently, several of us at the AIMS Center have become involved in an online community that is growing out of the just-released book by Mitch Resnick Ph.D. Resnick is the Director of MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten, a group of researchers and learners studying how people learn. Some of the ideas we have been generating… Continue Reading
Episode 62 | The Role of Play in Early Math Learning
As a follow up to their excellent and fun Colloquium talk on November 27, 2017; Elizabeth Gamino, Wilma Hashimoto, and Aileen Rizo join Chris in the studio to talk about the role play has in early learning and by extension to all learners. These three discuss in detail some of the activities they had the… Continue Reading
Teaching Nuggets Shared
The AIMS Professional Learning (PL) cadre of facilitators are classroom teachers from all over the United States. As a group, we work together to understand current best practices and how to better facilitate effective PL that is content-focused, active, collaborative, uses models and modeling, feedback and reflection, and is sustained over time. Because we are… Continue Reading
The Power of Imagination in Mathematics (Part 2)
My previous blog post dealt with how the power of imagination in object experiences helps children be able to form units to be counted. This time, we will take a look at how the power of imagination in counting helps children be able to form an abstract concept of number. Constructing a Counting Sequence Once… Continue Reading
