Category Archives: 3.1 Teaching & Learning

Is it playing with shapes? Or discovering Maths?

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When we first walked in to Tara’s class, I quickly spotted the plastic shapes that we would be using during the input. First thoughts: We were getting to play around for the hour. To an extent this was true.

I remember being taught a shape song during primary school, a song that would drive my grandparents wild every time I would sing it – thinking back though, I did sing it a lot. But, ask me to repeat it to you today and I have no idea. I can’t remember any of the tune. I can’t even recall the shapes themselves. So when Tara asked everyone to name the shapes, I stayed quiet. Triangles, squares and rectangles, yes but anything with more than 4 sides and I begin to struggle to recall. However, the more we spoke through them, the more it all started to resonate inside my brain.

 

We soon discovered that shapes which can tessellate are heavily used within Islamic art. I had never thought about shapes within art, never mind religious art. It soon became clear that in order to tessellate shapes had to join up together at a certain point creating an angle of 360 degrees. For example, triangles will tessellate as they will each bring an angle of 90 degrees to the shape, combining to make 360. This allows them to stick together leaving no gaps (shown bellow).  Squares also follow this rule (Shown below).

However, some shapes did not follow this rule and therefore could not tessellate such as pentagons and octagons. We tried to move them around in order to fill each gap, but were not successful. The gaps were too small to fit in another shape. This was interesting as I thought that all shapes would have been able to slot in with each other somehow. I was wrong.

 

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I started to discover that I was enjoying learning about how shapes could influence a piece of art. I have always loved art and regularly try to visit exhibitions and museums whenever I get the chance. So being given the chance to create some of my own was fun. It painted maths in a interesting way that had never been shown to me before.

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I hope to be able to one day incorporate this into a lesson when I have my own class as it is a excellent cross curriculum link between Math, RE and Art. It shows that art isn’t all about painting and drawing, but there is in fact some strategically importance behind decisions made when creating religious art. In my eyes, it paints maths in a practical and important way, one which is of high importance to many people across the world.

YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTeqUejf3D0

1 + 2 Approach

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I attended a talk by two teachers, who are part of the implementation of the 1+2 Approach here in the Dundee, Angus, Perth and Kinross area. It proved to be an eye opening talk about how much emphasis is needed to be placed on language learning within primary schools. So far out of the 35 pilot schools chosen to test the approach, 16 are in Dundee which is fantastic! The approach will not be fully in effect until 2020 when it will be implemented across Scotland.

There has been a gradual decline in the number of pupils leaving primary school with a knowledge of any other language than English. Due to this in September 2011, a work group was created to look into this and a report was produced with 55 recommendations of ways in which we should be tackling this problem.

The way the approach will work is :

  • Language 1 = L1 = Mother tongue
  • Language 2 = L2 = First modern language learnt from p1 onwards or earlier to hopefully S3
  • Language 3 = L3 = Second modern language learnt from p5 onwards or earlier to hopefully the end of high school.

(Language 2 has been decided to be French in the majority of schools however this is open to be changed to any language based on the choice of the area/school/teachers)

I believe this is a fantastic idea as we are now in a world that communicates with each other in a multilingual way. We are no longer able to rely on English and we all have to start developing a broader knowledge of languages be it Spanish, French, German or Mandarin, as the ability to speak another language is highly sought after. It has been proven that the best time to learn a language is during the early years when the brain finds it easiest to learn.  Starting to learn languages in primary school from an early age will be a great advantage to all students.
I believe that the 1 + 2 Approach is something that will not only affect the primary school setting, but also high school and further on in life. This approach will make sure that students have a wide range of opportunities available to them post high school, as many universities now want a language as part of admittance to their courses. Also,  for those who do not wish to go into further education the chance to speak the basics of a language when they are abroad will be very beneficial.