Recommended Resource for ALL Imaginative Teachers:
The BBC Earth website is a great resource for imaginative teaching. The articles reveal the exotic, bizarre, unique and awe-inspiring features of the world. They all evoke wonder. There is even a section called Record Breakers: The animals and plants that push the limits. Hello: Extremes & Limits of Reality learning tool!
Example for Math Teachers:
Take, for example, an article entitled The Most Beautiful Equation is…Pi by Melissa Hogenboom. This article frames mathematical equations in terms of BEAUTY (heroic quality tool) and then humanizes equations by interviewing different mathematicians and physicists (humanization of meaning tool) and asking these experts which equation they think is the MOST beautiful (extremes of experience and limits of reality tool). To top it all off readers can also vote (sense of agency tool).
New to Imaginative Education?
Heroic qualities, humanization of meaning, extremes of experience & limits of reality… these terms may be new to some readers. These are a few tools that allow us to provide our students with imagination-focused teaching.
Stay tuned for posts that look at all of the tools in our imaginative toolkits and how they can support learning all aspects of the curriculum.
This is great; I plan to use it in conjunction with one of many readily available youtube videos of “reciting pi” – where people have the amazing ability to recite long numbers of pi. Talk about extremes!
Oh good! I am glad you like it. Much more where that came from as we spread the IE word through this blog.
Reciting Pi is indeed extreme…and awesome!
The BBC Earth website is abundant with amazing information. My students will go crazy reading about the extremes. I also like that most of the information is written. So often students search for videos and the well written articles are composed with suspenseful narrative.
Hi Ryan! Nice to “see” you 🙂 Part of what this site will aim to do is to find such sources and pair them with those cognitive tools reminders.
In my Grade 6/7 class some of the students have been writing out Pi on a roll of receipt tape. So far they have 4000 digits. The idea was contagious and we had a few others write out a millionillion ( a 1 with 3003 zeros). We even have one guy who is attempting a googolplex. He realizes that there is no way he can finish it before he graduates Grade 12 but he is having fun attempting it. I’m going to have to get my hands on more receipt tape soon.
Love this! The idea that he won’t finish by Grade 12 is amazing.