Stories, Partners, and Spatial Reasoning—A Multifaceted Community Time
Last Wednesday, the whole school gathered in the gym for Community Time. Three or four times a year, the entire school comes together for a shared experience around an important community theme—reading, music, the Centennial, etc. During Community Time, different grades partner with one another, with older students helping younger ones with the activity at hand.
The Math Department led this week’s Community Time. Jake Nunes told the tale of a Chinese glassmaker who made a beautiful window for the emperor. Unfortunately, he dropped it on the way to the palace. Fortunately, it broke neatly into the seven tangram shapes. The glassmaker delighted the emperor by using the shapes to illustrate his journey through forests (a tangram tree), over hills (a tangram mountain range), and to the palace (a tangram castle). Jake projected each arrangement onto the huge screen in the gym. He then told a second story about two foxes eager to outsmart each other. Again, students saw how tangrams could be used to illustrate each scene in the story.
After teachers distributed the puzzle sheets, partners worked together to arrange the tangram pieces into the shapes below (as well as others). A true Shady Hill moment, it combined interdisciplinary learning, challenge, contextualization, mixed-ages, storytelling, community, and fun.
“This Community Time,” Jake explained, “is an example of how exploration and discovery are at the center of Shady Hill’s approach to math instruction through hands-on, experiential activities.”
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