We launched our ongoing Creating Spaces for Playful Inquiry professional learning community this year with a dinner event out at IDC for 50 Richmond teachers on October 22.

After time with materials, playful inquiry mentors Briana Adams and Jess Equia shared their investigation into fibres, sewing and natural dyes with Briana’s class. After dinner together, we broke into interest groups to engage in conversation with playful inquiry mentors.

The handout for the session can be downloaded here:

Follow up Studio Series sessions have been held in The Studio at Grauer. Our first session looked at the language of wool roving and what affordances it has. Teachers considered the story of wool from sheep to sweater and considered concepts such as texture and transformation that are developed as students work with this material.

Teachers had the opportunity to touch, transform and use wool roving in different ways to help deepen their understanding of this material and how they might use it in the classroom.

Our second Studio Series session looked at the language of cotton and what possibilities it offers us as a material. We considered the story of cotton from plant to t-shirt and also discussed the social and environmental implications of the cotton industry.

Teachers used cotton in different forms – fabric, rope, embroidery floss and thread – to create with.

Our third Studio Series session looked at fabrics, textiles and clothing and how fabric can be transformed to reflect identity, culture and place. Briana and Jess both shared families stories connected to textiles.

Our fourth and final Studio Series session looked at printmaking practices and examples of printmaking on fabrics from different parts of the world.

As we were unable to gather together in the spring to share and celebrate our learning from the year, Jess, Briana and I collected some ideas to share to continue our encounters with fibres and fabrics in both at-home and in-school contexts for June.

This document can be downloaded here:

Thank you to all the playful inquiry mentors for continuing to grow this community in our district and a special thank you to Briana and Jess for all their contributions!

~Janice

For our session together in December the grades 5&6&7 class at Quilchena examined two infographics about environmental issues and discussed how infographics use numbers and data in different ways to convey information, provoke thinking and to be persuasive. The students shared how they noticed how the infographics made some numbers large or highlighted them with colour to draw attention to them and how different types of charts or graphs can help the reader understand the information.

The students in the class have each selected a global issue that they are passionate about and have found an article in the National Geographic database to read and take notes on about their topic. They referred back to the article and their notes to find mathematical information that they could use in their own visual image that could become part of an infographic for their global issue project.

The students used apps (Pages, Paper or PicCollage) or online platforms (Canva, Piktograph) to create a visual for their project.

Through the process of creating their own visuals to share information, the teachers and I think the students will become more fluent at interpreting and analyzing infographics and other media.

~Janice

For another year, we have held this three-part after school series with primary teachers to think together about the big math ideas in mathematics. For this series we focused on counting, number sense and place value understanding. Each teacher was provided with the teacher resource book Choral Counting and Counting Collections by Megan Franke, Elham Kazemi and Angela Turrou-Chan.

At our first session, we reviewed the different aspects of counting (see pedagogical content knowledge paper on counting available at the bottom of this post) and discussed ideas for both choral counting and counting collections. Teachers worked together in small groups to plan and lead a choral count that they would use with their students.

Stenhouse Publishers have an online choral counting tool you can use to plan out choral counts with your students. You can access it HERE.

Teachers were also asked to use the new SD38 Early Numeracy Assessment with some students in their classes and provide feedback on its usage and findings. This tool will be available publicly soon after this last round of trials and feedback.

At our second session, teachers shared what routines and innovations they tried with their classes and then we did counting collections together, considering ways to extend the counting collection experience by recording both the process of counting and the final count as well as recording equations that describe the count.

At our third session, we focused on place value concept development through tasks and games. Teachers had the opportunity to make some numeral materials. Its always handy to have sets of numerals available in the primary classroom for students to make connections between concrete rerpesentations of quantity with symbolic forms.

Some of the text slides from the sessions can be downloaded here:

Some other resources shared during the series are available here:

I have been fortunate to collaborate and co-teach with some of the teachers in this series as we continue to think together about developing number sense through counting and place value tasks.

~Janice

Our second session of the year was hosted at Homma Elementary on November 28 – with thanks to Sarah and Reiko for having us.

K-7 Curriculum Implementation Teacher Consultant, Jess Eguia, began our time together with a land acknowledgement and three ways to enhance land acknowledgements in our schools. She shared the beaded timeline, sharing the story of time immemorial on this land,

and the Musqueam place names map which shares the significance of key places in the territory.

Jess also shared some ideas about Indigenous ways of knowing and being that could help teachers to elaborate and extend their students’ thinking about land acknowledgements.

Using land-based materials found locally, we did some bundle dyeing.

While the bundles steamed, we headed outside for a walk along the river, sharing stories of this place over time.

We came back into the Homma library for a hot cup of tea, the unbundling and sharing what we have been trying with our students, inspired by the resource books that are inspiring us this year.

Looking forward to continuing our conversations around land-based interdisciplinary projects in the new year!

~Janice

On November 27, I visited the grades 5&6&7 class at Quilchena to continue our focus on numeracy and for this session together I selected a numeracy task from Dr Peter Liljedahl’s website. The task continues the thinking we have been doing about water issues and and moves to thinking about agency around water conservation. We took some time together to go through what the task was asking of the students, what assumptions they needed to make, what calculations might be necessary and how they could share their recommendations.

Teachers Jen Yager and Sam Davis personalized the task by changing the names to teachers’ names from their staff. This made for some interesting comments about dental hygiene habits!

We needed to pause after the students read through and shared their understanding of the task with each other. Based on the experience we had with the last numeracy task we did, we had agreed to provide some supports to ensure students were able to get started with the task successfully. We talked through what the task was asking, what information they might need to research, what assumptions they needed to make and asked them about different ways they might approach the task.

When some of the students weren’t clear on what the differences between no flow, low flow and high flow of water was, a student quickly demonstrated for them at the sink.

The students researched the Canadian Dental Association’s recommendations for teeth brushing and did calculations for water usage. Based on their findings, they made recommendations to the teachers on ways they could conserve water while maintaining good dental hygiene. Some students wrote this up as a “report” while one student wrote a letter to her teacher with specific recommendations, backed up with her evidence.

Numeracy tasks such as these, organized by grade ranges, can be found on Dr. Peter Liljedahl’s website HERE.

~Janice