As has become tradition, here is my annual year-end blog post. I update and add new content to the pages part of this blog regularly but haven’t been creating posts regularly any more. And this year, I was on an educational leave for the first part of the school year until February 1 so this will be a shorter post!

Upon my return to district work in February, I was assigned three elementary schools to be the “point person” for from our district’s curriculum, instruction, and assessment team of teacher consultants. We are in the second year of using this structure in our district as one way to directly support schools staffs on a regular basis. I made visits to each school, often co-teaching in classrooms, chatting with teachers in the hallway or staffroom, doing lunch and learns or helping them find resources on the portal.

This year I have been working with the staffs at Anderson, Kidd, and Thompson.

• 

• 

• 

Some highlights from Anderson…

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

from Kidd…

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

and from Thompson:

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Every second year all stakeholder groups in our district come together for a district convention in February. This year it was February 16 at MacNeill Secondary. I hosted two sessions for grades 3-5 teachers (and had some secondary teachers attend!) that focused on the big ideas in number in this grade range – place value, fractions and decimal numbers.

• 

• 

In March, I hosted two sessions for parents who will be having their children start Kindergarten next year as part of our district’s Decoda-affiliated IPALS (Parents as Literacy Supporters in Immigrant Communities) program that our new Early Years Teacher Consultant Megan Zeni has been coordinating this year. I shared some of the big ideas in Early Mathematics with them along with ways they could support their child’s math development at home and in the community.

• 

• 

I began going to the Richmond Primary Teachers Extravaganza in my very first year of teaching in Richmond. It is always such a great event with fu professional learning workshops as well as time to reconnect with primary teachers across the district. It has been missed over the last few years and I was so glad to see it back this year! The RPTA Extravaganza was held on April 24 at Mitchell Elementary, coordinated by Ted Lim and his small team of RPTA executive members. I was excited to share an updated version of a science workshop I have done before called “Playing with Light”.

• 

• 

• 

• 

In April, I shared our district’s Numeracy Foundations framework and resources, along with the Coast Metro Elementary Math Project website, with elementary principals and vice-principals. Following that, I was invited to several elementary schools to do “lunch and learns” about these resources.

• 

Along with classes from Grauer, I had several classes visit The Studio on math field trips this spring. Schools that had classes visit including McNeely, Tomsett, Westwind, and Thompson.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

A big part of my job this term in the area of “content creation” was creating resources to support the numeracy focus of our district’s strategic plan. Part of that focus is on computational fluency and I created several new K-5 proficiency scales and assessment record-keeping tools to support content and competency assessment around number concepts and computational fluency. I also hosted several K-5 burst sessions on computational fluency and joined Shaheen Musani to hosted a series of sessions for grades 6-9 teachers. Recordings of all these sessions can be found on the district’s YouTube channel on a numeracy playlist HERE.

• 

• 

• 

Here’s an example of the types of proficiency scale and supporting documents that I have been working on. Currently there are only available on our district portal (and being transferred to our new Richnet).

When I returned to work I joined in some of the district inquiry grant projects focused on Numeracy Foundations. Maple Lane was one of these schools and they were continuing their focus from last year’s project. As part of their project we were able to secure a school-wide Julia Robinson Math Festival at the school on May 1. The facilitator worked with every class in the school and hosted a parent event after school.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Shaheen Musani and I hosted a session for K-9 teachers on May 17 about assessment in mathematics, with a focus on number concepts and computational fluency. We had a big room full of teachers thinking about assessment, proficiency scales, and how designing for learning and instructional approaches as well as reporting student learning, are all connected to the proficiency scales.

• 

• 

• 

In June, our district hosted a group of Community Field Experience (CFE) elementary teacher candidates from UBC for their three week practicum experience. The CFE experience allows teacher candidates a “behind the scenes” look at the district and also helps them learn about other teaching related jobs they can do with their B.Ed. degree, such as a district teacher consultant. I hosted the group for a day in The Studio at Grauer having a tour of the school and the different district programs hosted there, an overview of the district’s math and numeracy resources and then time spent with two grades 2&3 classes doing the type of work I often do in my role as a teacher consultant.

• 

• 

Shaheen Musani posted into a newly created position on our team this spring – Grades 6-12 Numeracy and Assessment. Although we have worked together on many math and numeracy projects over the last few years, it is so nice to have someone else “officially” on our district curriculum, instruction, and assessment team with numeracy in their portfolio. We were able to work together in June to put together a map of connected professional learning experiences for K-12 teachers in our district next year.

In my 33rd year of teaching in Richmond, I continue to try and nudge my own pedagogies and understanding of mathematics. One project that was a highlight for me this term was the Sasquatch Math Stories project, described in this blog post HERE. Thinking about culturally responsive and place and land-based pedagogies, Indigenous Storywork, and Reggio-inspired principles and practices informed how this project was designed and how it unfolded. The BC Reggio-Inspired Mathematics Project read the book Mathematizing Children’s Literature this year for their book club and that collaboration inspired this project with a focus on noticing and wondering about the text and illustrations and engaging in math investigations inspired by the story. We focused on problem-solving and problem-posing involving quantities, operations, and measurement for math tasks but students were also able to choose their own interdisciplinary project that had math as a focus. Some of their projects including creating story landscapes, weaving, and creating clay characters to scale.

One of my colleagues at Grauer knows the author of the book and shared the blog post with him. The following is his response:

Although I have some academic reading and writing to do this summer, I plan on reading these two professional resources as we think ahead to next year and professional learning in our district.

• 

• 

As someone who likes to play with textile arts, the metaphor of weaving has always been a strong one for me. Throw in my Scottish ancestry on my maternal side and tartans – the concept of through lines also resonates.

• 

• 

• 

Some of the main through lines for my work this year have been:

How do we design playful and joyful learning experiences in mathematics?

What does it mean to proficient in mathematics?

What different ways do students develop computational fluency?

What connections can teachers and students make to mathematics? Thinking about self, community, culture, identity, place, story, daily life and math-to-math connections.

• 

• 

• 

Have a wonderful summer full of rest, joy, and adventure!

~Janice

During third term of this school year, I worked with Francesca Fotheringham and her grades 2&3 class in The Studio at Grauer to explore the local story The Sasquatch, The Fire, and the Cedar Baskets by Joseph Dandurand, an Indigenous author and Simon Daniel James, an Indigenous illustrator. We read a part of the story each week, drawing out the story experience over several weeks.

We began by “noticing and wondering” about the cover illustrations and title and the students made connections to Coast Salish design elements and forest fires. Many students had not heard of the term Sasquatch and I had anticipated this in my preparations of being “storywork ready” and shared a bit about the story of the Sasquatch in our region and how it is often called “Big Foot” in the USA.

If you are not familiar with Dr. Jo-ann Archibald’s Indigenous Storywork, you can find out more at the website HERE.

Along the way, we recorded connections and questions that came up for the students, often pausing together to do a mini-investigation of a mathematical idea. By doing so, we were enacting some of the ideas from the book Mathematizing Children’s Literature: Sparking connections, joy, and wonder through read-alouds and discussion by Allison Hintz and Antony Smith. Some teachers in our district were in a book club with this book as part of the BC Reggio-Inspired Mathematics Project.

Two examples of mini-investigations that we did were figuring out the length of the Sasquatch’s foot at the beginning of the story and investigating the quantity of 1000 later in the story.

We read the factual information from the book and used a metre stick on the ground to model an approximate length of the Sasquatch foot. It was interesting that the book use imperial measurements so we had to do some mental math calculations to convert to metres and centimetres. Some students also thought about this information as they created scale Sasquatch characters for their stories, with clay.

• 

• 

• 

• 

The quantity of 1000 came up a few times in the story – 1000 years, 1000 baskets and 1000 butterflies. To build understanding of the quantity of 1000, students were invited to build and make 1000 in many ways.

• 

• 

• 

After our weekly reading, students were invited to choose from continuing with a related project they were doing or to pose a math problem inspired by the story. We practiced posing problems a few times to develop important understandings such as the language structure and information needed in a story or problem, and the need for their to be a question or something to solve.

After many “drafts” of problems, Francesca had the students complete and illustrate a final problem to be shared with others to solve.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

A collection of some of the problems can be found here:

After reading the story, these problems could be projected on a screen for students to solve, printed and cut into problem strips for students to choose from and solve, or to inspire students to pose their own problems.

Some of the students were particularly interested in weaving and chose to investigate weaving cedar baskets as their inquiry project. They looked at my cedar mat and basket that I had learned to make from local Indigenous weavers and the students used strips of black construction paper to weave and figure out how baskets are made.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

A group of students played with re-telling the story or creating their own Sasquatch stories using shadow puppets and creating story landscapes with story materials. From these play experiences, extensions and variations to the story as well as math problems emerged.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

As we read the story, we also focused on knowledge building around local species, making connections to how math helps us identify and describe different living things. We learned about the cedar tree, salmon, local berries, and mushrooms.

Because this was an ongoing study, I added photographs and information we collected along the way to a “living documentation” wall in The Studio. The teachers and students both used this wall as a place of inspiration, to recall past experiences, and to go to for information.

As we came to the end of the story and read the last page, one of the students commented, “I thought there was going to be another page!” which gave us the opportunity to discuss story structures and how one type of local Indigenous story (again, see Dr. Jo-ann Archibald’s work) leaves us without a resolution that many of us anticipate in a story and instead, leaves us wondering what might happen or come next. With repeated hearing of a story over time, children, and then adults might take different meanings from these stories. In our BC curriculum the structure of “beginning, middle, end” is still included as “the” story structure and part of Indigenizing our curriculum and pedagogy is sharing stories with non-Eurocentric story structures such as this one.

At the end of May, we spent two sessions together finishing up math stories and projects students has begun as well as re-visiting the importance of the cedar tree to local Indigenous cultures.

We watched this video – Knowledge Keepers: Cedar Harvest – from the Museum of Anthropology about the cultural significance of cedar and how it is harvested, featuring local weaver Jessica Silvey.

• 

• 

• 

• 

We also read more information books from Strong Nations about cedar. Some students then followed a berry design “math mat” pattern shared by Jessica’s studio to create cedar mats and others created their own patterns in their weavings. We made connections to the local berries in the story and I brought in some branches of salmonberry which fruit in this area in June, known as the time of the salmonberry in Musqueam culture.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Another connected art experience some students chose was to create cedar mono prints using gel plates and they noticed the detail, pattern, and shapes in the red cedar that we used.

This interdisciplinary project was a way to ground a math project in story and make connections as the story progressed and was experienced in different ways, through retelling, using materials, building knowledge and creating story landscapes. It required some design thinking to consider how to navigate weaving between story, math problem posing, and interdisciplinary investigations but I think the students responded so positively to this approach to learning and thinking about mathematics, Indigenous knowledge and stories, and the world around them.

With thanks to classroom teacher Francesca Fotheringham and the grades 2&3 students in division 5 at Grauer for their participation and contributions to this project.

~Janice