Valentines

This morning, instead of doing a traditional exchange of valentines in our class, we began by rereading Norton Juster's wonderful picture book The Dot and the Line: a romance in lower mathematics. Norton Juster was also the author of The Phantom Tollbooth. The Dot and the Line is the story of a staid and rule-bound line who falls in love with a perfect dot... but she only has eyes for an unkempt squiggle, "who never seemed to have anything on his mind at all." The book is both mathematical and a beautiful love story; it subtly extolls the virtues of effort and self-control in choosing who one would like to be. We first read it at the beginning of this year, in math, but I've been getting requests to hear it again, and Valentine's day seemed like the perfect occasion. We all enjoyed reading it again!

After our reading, we had a talk about each person's character in the play, and who that character loves. There are many kinds of love: romantic love, filial love, parental love, the love of old friends, the love of teachers and students, the love of loyal allies... The children made valentines to give to the different people their characters love, and passed them around. Some children even drew from their own lines in the play to find expressions of the way they felt about someone, or to get inspiration for describing another character. It was interesting to talk about which characters have only a few ties of affection within the story, and which ones seem to have ties to nearly everybody...

Math and science, part 2

By a fun coincidence, we discovered that in the last couple of weeks, Mrs. Carpenter's math group has been studying probability, while Jesse had also been doing some interesting probability exercises with my group. So, my group took the activities they'd been doing with Jesse, plus a few of their own invention, and we took them in to share with the younger kids. We spun the globe to see where it would wind up, flipped pennies, played a version of red light/green light determined by dice, and "danced by chance"—assigned a movement to each number on a die, and rolled to create choreography! Today, my group finished graphing and discussing our results, and we took our findings in to share. We even videotaped ourselves performing some of the dances, which was lots of fun!