LP1

There will be 5 total groups. Each group will be responsible for highlighting connections between the 3 little pigs story and ONE of the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) disciplines. However, keep in mind, that ALL tasks must also involve opportunities for mathematics engagement.

Together, your will choose only ONE idea for a task to develop for this assignment.

There are lots of great mathematics tasks out there, and it is a more effective use of your time to make good tasks even better than to develop tasks from scratch. In other words, it’s smarter to make use of resources available to you than to try to design your own curriculum! Instead, I encourage you to select a task that is already an inclusive mathematics task or has the potential to be with only minor adaptations. Once you have a solid foundation for a math task, you can adapt the task to more strongly connect to the 3 little pigs and your STEAM discipline.

You’re welcome to use whatever resources are available to you, but here are a few recommendations:

• TOP RECOMMENDATION - Teaching Children Mathematics or Teaching Mathematics in the Middle School available at https://www.lib.utk.edu/
  • You have free access to this journal through the UTK library. Once you've navigated to the journal website, you can search within the journal for your STEAM discipline. For example, I easily found this article about using the story of Goldilocks to connect to engineering. This resource is nice because it usually gives you some insight into how children are likely to approach the problems.

Other suggested options:

• https://illuminations.nctm.org/
• https://www.youcubed.org/tasks/
• https://nrich.maths.org/12631
• http://www.nctm.org/publications/worlds/default.aspx?id=75520
• http://francesharper.com
• These sites have a list of other places that you might look: https://www.mictm.org/index.php/resources/rich-math-tasks http://www.sfusdmath.org/sources-for-math-problems-and-activities.html

Once you’ve selected a task (or a few tasks), solve the task. It’s often impossible to tell what mathematical thinking is involved in a task unless you do it yourself (this is true for me, too!). I recommend that your group members solve the task(s) separately. By doing this, you might come up with different ways to solve the task!

Decide if the task is an inclusive math task. Some indicators that a task is inclusive:

• The work involved in the problem is more important that the answer itself. (In other words, the process matters more than the answer.)
• All students can access the problem because…there are multiple ways to get started, there are multiple strategies that students might use, there are multiple right answers, or there is a visual or a concrete model that helps students make sense of the problem, etc.
• There is room for students to explore more math concepts at a higher level because…the task can’t simply be solved by using a straightforward algorithm, once the task is solved, the answer inspires additional questions that could be answered with mathematics, or the task could be used with students across grade levels, etc.
• The task promotes rich mathematical discourse because...students need to talk about their thinking and work together to solve the task, students might disagree about the answer or approach, or the strategy for solving the task is not immediately clear, etc.