October 10th - Entrance Slip

I feel as though many curricular mathematics ideas could and should incorporate bodily movements to encourage understanding. One idea that comes to mind was your example from last month of moving your body along with the curvature of a given function to help understand high and low points as well as its roots. I also find that when tutoring students in physics, it really helps them to understand projectile motion when they model the motion of the projectile with their pencil in hand. These examples are very anecdotal to myself personally but are enough to justify for me why they could be useful in the classroom.

Despite this, I think we have historically under utilized embodied ways of learning in the classroom. For example, the hand trick with the nine times table really illustrates the pattern of the 9 times table (1st digit goes up 1, 2nd goes down 1) and teaches students the pattern very visually. However, I didn't learn about this until I was an adult but I think this trick has been known for a very long time. Hand tricks like this can also be used in trigonometry to remember the sine and cosine ratios for the angles 0, 30, 45, 60, and 90, and are extremely useful to remove the rote memorization of these ratios and students to use them in application.