Sixth graders at Kennedy Middle School in Rockford Public Schools District 205 are learning math while making lamps, WIFR-TV (CBS affiliate) reports.
In the district’s new Arts Infusion Program, educators use hands-on projects like this one to teach students math concepts such as ratios, perimeters, and proportions. Students use the class as an elective, so they still have a regular sixth-grade math class. They just use the elective to pick up some additional skills in math while having fun building things.
“They’re learning about some angles also in there so they’re incorporating a lot of different math concepts and getting to create this amazing project,” teacher Suzanne Delgado was quoted as saying. The program also incorporates dance and theater into math lessons. “Doing arts and crafts and learning at the same time,” one sixth grader explained.
The inclusion of arts has some basis in research: One reason some students might struggle with math in a traditional classroom is that certain parts of the brain don’t get activated while kids are sitting in a desk listening to a lecture. By using the arts to activate those regions in the brain, “we’re hoping to see some success,” the station quoted Ms Delgado as saying.
Some researchers have called this “divergent thinking,” and it means taking old problems and bringing in different regions of the brain to solve them in new ways. As Albert Einstein said:
The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.
Students making lamps or doing a dance means they are doing much more than solving math problems: they’re reformulating those problems and not simply coming up with a solution. They’re on their way!
