At the beginning of this semester, the study unit was “The festivals connected to different faiths/cultures”. Relying on the school’s rich foreign teacher resources, so many foreign teachers from America, Malaysia, South America, and Australia were invited to talk about cultures and holidays of their countries.
Before students learn about the cultures of different countries, they need to understand and love the profound and deep Chinese culture. While in Math Class, how can we incorporate math teaching content into Chinese cultural learning in order to better fit this unit? After researching, teacher Zhang Yanhui chose to teach the movement of shapes. She hoped to give students a great math research class using paper-cut as the media so that children can fully use their brains, hands and mouths.
After the class bell rang, teacher Zhang hit the topic quickly. First, she played a short video about paper-cut culture to attract children’s attention. Then, she asked them what the relationship is between paper-cut patterns and math. This section set up a good preparation for their following study and creation.
In the “Finding out” section, children needed to design and cut a little paper figure. Also they had to answer a series of challenging questions given by Teacher Zhang by doing the paper cut themselves and thinking hard. At the end of class, she also gave out a very different assignment to students. In this assignment, students need to cut out little figures using the new knowledge they just learned.
Math learning not only relies on input and memory. According to PYP’s educational objective, we want to encourage them to be inquirers. This means that our teachers need to protect the curiosity of children, and lead them forward.
