Page 23 - FIS World December 2020

Number talks in their home language helps support students’ cultural identities
and increases their self-confidence and integration into the FIS community.
In addition to shuffling groups so that the younger students could show greater leadership, Ms. Dreher and Mr. Rose presented students with an additional challenge. Each group was given a set of playing cards, an iPad, and a measuring stick. The students could be as creative as they wanted but were tasked with building a variety of card structures that would stand for at least 15 seconds. Students were excep- tionally engaged and used a variety of approaches to solving the challenge.
The final project of the year was for students to create a multilingual math dictionary. This math dictionary, it is hoped, will become an invaluable tool for all
students, teachers and parents in supporting learning in math across the school. When completing the task, students were able to build upon the relationships they had developed earlier to work together to create the dictionary. The multilingual dictionary will be available on ipads across the school and for use at home. There will also be multilingual word clouds created that teachers can use in their classrooms when teaching specific math vocabulary.
Current restrictions due to Covid-19 have made whole-school multilingual learning experiences difficult to hold. But like most of the rest of the world, the program’s organizers have come up with ways to keep student groups connected: Zoom and Google. This year’s mixed-group number talks started off with students self-sorting themselves into language- based teams. After students choose their teams, they collaborated through Zoom. Teachers and students experienced a few hiccups using Zoom, but organizers learned a few things that will undoubtedly help during future sessions. And when those take place, math learning will remain at the forefront - regardless of the language being spoken.
Megan Dreher and Gareth Rose FISW Teachers
Self-sorting into language- based teams helps students problem solve together
December 2020 FIS World 21