Week of Inspirational Maths: Back-to-school lessons

https://www.youcubed.org/week-inspirational-math/
https://www.youcubed.org/week-inspirational-math/

by Jo Boaler and the youcubed team | Youcubed at Standford University

Back-to-school season has arrived, and youcubed is here to support your return to the classroom with our 2024 Week of Inspirational Maths (WIM)! You don’t need to plan any lessons for the first few weeks of class as we have done it for you! All of the lessons, and classroom videos, are designed to help set up a mindset culture in your classroom. We have some great resources for you this year, including our new lesson starters that include number talks, dot talks, art talks, data talks, and shape talks. What better way to start the class than with questions that will open students up, and invite them to share their thinking?

Many of you use our free WIM resources at the beginning of school and throughout the year, and you have shared with us that you and your students love the tasks, videos and posters. If you haven’t tried WIM yet, it’s easy to create a playlist that will give you a week (or more) worth of mindset mathematics lessons and encourage a positive classroom culture, a great way to set up your students for success all year long! If you would like to learn more about these teaching approaches, our professional development calendar includes training on teaching mathematics conceptually and using “math-ish” strategies in the classroom. You can read more about these workshops and see our 2024-25 professional development schedule below. And remember to share your WIM experiences on social media with the hashtags #weekofinspirationalmath and/or #weekofinspirationalmaths

Here are a selection of the new resources in this 2024 WIM, that will add to the thousands of other resources available:

Lesson Starters (Grades 3-10)
For WIM 2024, we are introducing a new resource for teachers, a collection of lesson starters called What do you See? These are ready-to-go slides you can use to begin your class with a Dot Talk, Number Talk, Shape Talk, Data Talk, or Indigenous Maths Art Talk. Launching mathematics lessons with a talk is a great way to establish the value of different approaches to a problem and help students build mental representations of mathematical concepts. All the talks are included in a single deck of Google Slides, with “how to” information embedded throughout so that you can choose the opener that works best for that day’s lesson goals.

Dice Explorations (All Grades)
Dice games can be a playful way to explore mathematical activities at every grade level. We have created five tasks, for the entire K-12+ range, that include important concepts such as number flexibility, making 7’s and 10’s, cubes, nets, generalization, and computational thinking.


Olympic Sport Exploration (Grades 6-12)
If your students are coming back to the classroom still feeling the excitement of the Paris games, they will love this task! Using data gathered from 2021, Olympic Sport Exploration will introduce students to the data science process of formulating questions, considering data, analyzing data, and interpreting/communicating findings.

Fractions Puzzles (Grades 4-7)
This task uses area visuals and the fun of solving puzzles to engage students in learning about fractions! In Fraction Puzzles, students are challenged to find the area of composite shapes while also developing an understanding of equivalent fractions.

Rainbow Remix (Grades 4-10)
This is a fun, colorful and challenging task that helps students conceptualize numerator and denominator. Rainbow Remix introduces key ideas of symmetry, fractions, and area and encourages fractional reasoning.

Discovering the Unit Circle (Grades 10-12)
If you are a high school teacher looking for ways to help your students grasp the unit circle, Discovering the Unit Circle is for you! The unit circle can be a daunting concept for students, but our new WIM task lets students explore this topic based on their basic knowledge of circles and graphs. The only prerequisite is that students are comfortable with either the Pythagorean Theorem or right triangle trigonometry. This task includes an extension called the Giant GIF—we are eager to see what your students create with it, please share their work with us!

Number Circle Stars (Grades 4-10)
What if, instead of skip counting on a line, students skip count on a circle? Number Circle Stars poses this question and encourages students to explore the ideas that emerge. This task is designed to allow students to exercise their agency and creativity as they play with some introductory ideas in the fields of graph theory and group theory.

NEW Professional Development
We are really excited about our lineup of workshops for the 2024-25 school year! Based on feedback from a survey we sent in a previous newsletter, we have designed workshops with the most-requested topics, online options, and grade-band-specific content. As always, we will offer our summer camp training, both in person and online, and our virtual workshop on teaching Explorations in Data Science. We have also added new workshops on teaching mathematics conceptually and using a “Math-ish” approach in the classroom. The full schedule follows. Click on any set of dates to learn more and register.

We do charge a fee for our workshops, which is the main way that we fund youcubed, and most schools will cover the cost as teacher professional development. However, we understand that the fees do not fit within every school’s budget, so we have a scholarship program for eligible educators. To inquire about scholarships, register with a school purchase order, or ask a question about our workshops, please send an email to pdinfo@youcubed.org.

And if you have some time before school starts and would like an online course with teaching strategies and ideas, remember we have our very popular online courses. We hope you enjoy this year’s WIM and join us for professional development to continue your exploration of these teaching strategies!

Viva La Maths Revolution,
Jo & the youcubed team

NebraskaMATH Thu. Aug. 15, 2024