On June 2, the Robertson Program took part in the University of Toronto’s annual spring reunion. Bev Caswell, Larisa Lam and Zach Pedersen, along with second-year MA-CSE students Breanna Wu and Sukanya Rastogi, brought math and science activities to the OISE Kids’ Passport Tent located at the St. George Campus. Many former U of T students visited the tent, giving us an opportunity to meet their children!
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- The Robertson Program’s Dr. Bev Caswell, Larisa Lam and Zach Pedersen, along with Dr. Mary Reid and her math team.
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- Children use patterning to create beaded “math bracelets”
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- Sukanya Rastogi and a child work on spatial reasoning
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- Sukanya Rastogi helps children with their “math bracelets”
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- Dr. Bev Caswell, Breanna Wu, Zach Pedersen Larisa Lam and Sukanya Rastogi
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- A U of T alumni and his son make geometric 3D structures using frameworks
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- Larisa Lam and Zach Pedersen help participants visualize 3D shapes with the open box activity
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- A JICS student and her mom visited us at the reunion!
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- JICS librarian Krista Spence and her daughter found their way to our tent!
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- The poster for the Kids’ Passport event
We introduced many math activities to strengthen children’s spatial reasoning and geometric thinking. This included cookie sheet symmetry, framework building, pentomino puzzles, tangram animals, hole punch symmetry, pattern block activities, the hexagon card game, animal grid coding and dice games. We also used a radar gun to determine the speed of a bean bag being thrown at a wall. We compared the speed of the throw by the length of the individual’s arm, as well as their age. This demonstrates how easy it is to generate data for children to analyze mathematically.
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- Bev Caswell uses a radar gun to determine the speed of a child’s throw
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- A family celebrates their mom’s speedy throw
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- Breanna Wu helps a child put their speed on a graph
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- Generating data: Speed of the throw compared to age
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- Generating data: Speed of the throw compared to arm length
Each child that visited us also received a package of pentominoes to take home!
We were lucky to share the tent with OISE professor Mary Reid and her math team! Special thanks to Natalie Neumann Butler, External Relations Coordinator at OISE/University of Toronto, for all of her work organizing this event!
The Robertson Program took part in the OISE Kids’ Passport Tent, representing the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study.
