Celebrating our mathematical thinking

JOY OF X presents MATH SURPRISE - a research performance

The typical response to "What did you learn in math today?" might be "I don't know" or "Nothing." We've been working to change this by:

engaging children with math worth talking about, and
helping them develop skills for telling good math stories

The song below is from the mathematical thinking of grade 3 students, based on math dialogues they scripted to share with family and friends.

Hi Stella!
What did you learn
in math today?

It’s a surprise!!
Please tell me.
OK.

I learned that even numbers
They hide in a rectangle.
Even numbers hide in a rectangle

CHORUS
Evens hide
They play hide-and-seek
Take a look or take a peek
Bet you didn’t know that even numbers
Hide in a rectangle
Even numbers hide in a rectangle

Take a piece,
Hey it’s a 2.
Take some more,
Hey a 4.
Take another,
Hey it's 6,
And another
Hey 8,
And another
Hey 10, good job.

CHORUS
Evens hide
They play hide-and-seek
Take a look or take a peek
Bet you didn’t know that even numbers
Hide in a rectangle
Even numbers hide in a rectangle

The typical response to "What did you learn in math today?" might be "I don't know" or "Nothing." We've been working to change this by:

engaging children with math worth talking about, and
helping them develop skills for telling good math stories

The song on the left is from the mathematical thinking of grade 3 students, based on math dialogues they scripted to share with family and friends.

Get the mp3 file.
See the original song, performed by the students for the Math Performance Festival.
See also a math fairytale called Who's the Big Bad Wolf? about the patterns with even and odd numbers discussed in the music video.
See an article from the London Free Press.
See George Gadanidis' new book, What did you do in Math today?

Some articles on this theme:

Gadanidis, G. & Borba, M. (2008). Our lives as performance mathematicians. For the Learning of Mathematics, 28(1), 42-49.
Gadanidis, G., Hughes, J., & Borba, M. (2008). Students as performance mathematicians. Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, 14(3), 168-175.
Gadanidis, G., Borba, M., Hughes, J., & Scucuglia, R. (2010) “Tell me a good math story”: digital mathematical performance, drama, songs, and cell phones in the math classroom. In Pinto, M. F. & Kawasaki, T.F. (Eds.). Proceedings of the 34th Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (Vol. 3, pp. 17-24). Belo Horizonte, Brazil: PME.