Gee it’s been cold in Castlemaine lately! Bone chilling frosts and icy windscreens have made it hard to get out of bed and get to work in the mornings but… then I remember all the magnificent Maths teaching and learning that is happening! Our Grade 3/4 unit have been looking at how they can incorporate some lessons where the students need to create and analyse graphs so we adapted a Maths300 lesson (if you haven’t checked it out yet, what are you waiting for!) to fit our needs.

We started off by using Charles Lovitt’s flower petal lesson elements to assess what would hopefully make this lesson engaging and help students learn best. See Pete’s post about Charles Lovitt here for more information about this. The first element we added was embedding the lesson within a story shell. Due to the cold weather, we decided to tell students that the class mascot was not dealing with the freezing temperatures too well and that we need to knit a scarf to keep it warm. This initial prompt sparked student interest. Anything to do with their class mascot is normally an instant hit!

We gave the students brief instructions and a bit of finger knitting practise before challenging them to knit as much as they could in 15 minutes. After the 15 minutes had passed with varying levels of knitting success we marvelled at our wonderful work. It was time to explore the maths with our knitting!

We started by giving the students a lesson goal: I can make collaborate and build off each other’s ideas and make sure that everyone in my group is involved. We have steered away from content goals and are using Jo Boaler’s Mathematical Mindset Practices to design our learning intentions. The students mentioned that they were already working towards this goal by helping each other with finger knitting and encouraging everyone on what they had achieved.

One of the things I judge the success of a lesson on is when parents come to talk about it with you. So many of the students started knitting at home and discussing the lesson with their parents which helps create stronger links between school and at home. One student finger knitted for so long at home that she could go the whole way around her house!

The students were so engaged by this task and compared lengths by laying their knitting on the floor before making categories and creating graphs in their books. The lesson linked to the Grade 3/4 inquiry Big Question about ‘Where Does It Come From and Why?’ by provoking student thinking into why we use wool? What else is it used for? What are your clothes made out of? Why? What is better for the environment? And so on…

Attached below is the lesson plan, detailing how teachers went about this task. Do you think this would work with your class? If you give it a go, please get in touch and let us know what enabled this lesson to work well with your class and what barriers you came across to achieving success.