Math Waves

— by George Gadanidis

Making (Math) Waves in Grade 3 Classrooms 🙂

I was working in three Grade 3 classrooms, and the teachers asked if I had any ideas for teaching about bar graphs.

Our work together involved  — as always — adding rich contexts for content that teachers have to teach.

One idea that came to me was, “Let’s bar graph the height of time!” View the video below to see what I mean.

This is really cool because the core idea stretches all the way to high school trigonometry. View the video below to see what I mean.

After we did these activities in the three classrooms, children shared their learning at home. Comments from parents were used to make the song below, which children sang back to their parents.

Try it in your classroom!

 

BACK TO HIGH SCHOOL

Now that we’ve learned how to communicate about circular functions to non-experts, we are taking these ideas back to high school classrooms, along with coding extensions, to help students develop richer conceptual understandings.

 

GET THE MATH WAVES STORY

Get the story Math Waves ($5) that Molly (whose voice you hear in the videos above) and I wrote. The story comes in a 43-page PDF, in 3 languages (English, French and Spanish), along with a detailed lesson plan and coding extensions.

 

READ A BRIEF ARTICLE

Get a 4-page PDF article about this activity: Gadanidis, G. (2012). Trigonometry in grade 3? What Works? Research into Practice. 42, 1-4.