I absolutely lost it in class this week when this video was played during our lesson: I believe James Blunt's Your Beautiful was released when I was 15 years old. At the time, I believed it was the sole most romantic song ever. Never did I guess that I would rediscover my love for the sappy ballad nearly 10 years later, in math class, no less. And yet there I was, on Monday night, learning about Geometry and Spatial Sense and absolutely cracking up over "My Triangle", Sesame Street's brilliant parody of my former favourite song. Sesame Street has a wonderful method of pairing pop culture with educational concepts. Occasionally the show will feature a guest star, usually a popular actor or musician, to help explain principles of language, social studies and mathematics to very young children. In James Blunt's feature, a very simple geometric concept, that of a triangle, is sung in detail to children. Triangles may not seem like the most interesting concept in the world, but when they, and other geometric concepts, are addressed in a fun way, such as through song, kids become enthusiastic about learning. In class, we applied this principle to other topics related to Geometry & Spatial Sense. Using marshmallows and toothpicks, we created geometric shapes like rectangular prisms, cubes and pyramids. This kind of activity gives kids hands-on experience with geometry while engaging them through the novelty of creating 3D objects and solids using fun materials.

Inrig, E. (2016, November 7). Building Shapes with Marshmallows [photograph]. Retrieved from my iPhone.

When students are able to put together the elements of a solid object, such as the sides (toothpicks) and vertices (marshmallows), they gain a more thorough understanding of geometry.

We continued to explore other ways of making geometry fun and exciting. Gamification of geometry can be achieved through games like Tangrams and Shape Battleship. I personally enjoyed guessing shapes using Tangrams and sinking rectangular prisms on a grid while playing Shape Battleship, and I'm sure young students would love to do so as well.

I hate to admit it, but prior to this class, I very seldom thought of patterning and algebra as related. Patterning, to me, was about repeating images and numbers. It was a visual arrangement; a part of mathematics that was tangible and easier to understand than algebra. Algebra was mystery. It was about solving unknowns, and it was usually a challenge. Algebra looked like x's and y's. It looked like an extra complicated equation, and it was not visually friendly the way patterning was.

I'm beginning to develop a new-found appreciation for math-based storybooks. Initially, The Hershey's Milk Chocolate Fraction Book left a bad taste in my mouth, pun very much intended. I found the book to be rather vapid, thanks to its general lack of a plot. This week, however, we read another mathematically-themed book, If You Hoped Like a Frog by David M. Schwartz. This picture book revealed the sweeter side to math stories. Imaginative pictures made the book engaging, even though it did not contain any tangible plot. Schwartz's creative analogies made the concept of proportional thinking relatable for children. Kids can wrap their heads around ratios when they are likened to scenarios that occur in their daily lives.

Once kids have a basic understanding of number sense and numeration, and particularly of ratios and proportioning, they can begin to take on open ended mathematical puzzles. In class we took on the question of a Giant's Height. Armed with only a gigantic hand print belonging to a "giant", we were tasked with solving the mystery of how tall such a giant would stand. The best part of this inquiry is that there is no official "right answer". Nor was there any one way to go about solving it.
In my table group, I discovered that we all had different methods of trying to determine how tall the giant could be. I was most interested in using statistics to determine the height. I believed that if we compared the height of the giant's hand to the statistical average of a human male's hand, we could use the ratio to determine the overall height. My tablemates chose to solve the question differently, by actually measuring their own heights and comparing it to the hand of the giant. Once again, I am reminded that there are many ways of determining the answer to a problem. Even when it comes to proportions, your method of choice is only proportional to others'!