I was at the light bright one afternoon writing out MOXI in no particular colors when Harold, a boy no older than 6 years old came over and asked if he could help me. We worked together to make the X and the I and then Harold took a step back and looked at what we had created. He turned to me and said the letters should really be in rainbow colors and continues to explain that the M should be red, the O orange, the X yellow, and the I green. So we took down what we had made and started new. Since Harold had to stand on a stool to reach, he decided that we should take turns with each letter, one person would hand the other the designated peg color while the other wrote the letter. Harold started with the M first. Before even putting the first peg in, he looked at the holes in the light bright and asked how do I make a straight line up? He used his fingers to draw an M and realized he would have to skip a line in order to make the sides on the M. Harold carefully counted the pegs on each side and made observations about the lengths and the shape of the inside lines of the M sharing with me that it created a V. After multiple attempts at making the perfect M, Harold had finally created an M he was satisfied with. It was now my time to make the O. Harold handed me the orange pieces while I created an O. Next the X. I handed Harold the yellow pieces while he once again counted out loud all of the holes to make sure the X was even on all sides and lined up with the other letters. Once we had MOXI written out on the light bright, we decided to add blue and purple to complete our rainbow. My idea was to underline MOXI and Harolds idea was to create a circle around the MOXI sign. We compromised with the idea to create a large square border around our MOXI sign. We started to create our border when Harold mentioned that we needed to leave enough space to write our names. He took my name tag and counted the number of letter in my name. He then explained to me that his name has six letters and my name has six letters and six plus six is twelve so we need enough space to fit twelve letters. With that in mind, we continues to create our border when Harold took a break to get some water from the fountain. On the way back he stoped and called me over near the build it test it race it track. I thought he wanted to move on and build cars but when I got over to him he explained to me that our boarder was thin on one side and thick on the other. He looked at me and asked if I could see it and said we needed to move all the pieces on the thick side over so it was even on both sides. We fixed the border, and wrote our names collaboratively since we were running out of time. Harold continued counting spaces and stepping back after every letter to make sure everything looked good. After over and hour of hard work, we had completed our MOXI sign with our names written underneath!
I was able to observe Harold using a variety of epistemic practices and NGSS practices throughout this interaction.
Harold-
Applied math knowledge to problem-solving: through the creation of the letters by counting the holes, making sure there was enough space for our names, and figuring out the border widths.
Persisting and learning from failure: the M was very difficult for Harold and kept looking like an N but he continued to modify, count, and draw the letter on the light bright until he got the perfect M.
Asked questions and defined problems: Asked questions throughout the building process and defined problems such as the unevenness of the border which led to designing a solution.
Envisioned possible solutions: would often create a letter, step back and look at it, and then change the pegs around to create the same letter in a different “better” way.
Woking effectively in teams: through effective communication and delegation of tasks
No comments:
Post a Comment