Before math class this week, I knew what tangrams were, but I had never really worked with them before. It was fascinating to see how some people could go right to the answer to the giraffe puzzle, while others sometimes didn’t even get it when someone showed it to them. And it was also interesting when we were asked to double its size, how some people were able to envision it, while others gave up in frustration. It once again reinforced the idea that there are many different ways to be smart at math!
I found myself wondering how tangrams might work into the “curriculum”. It is obviously a form of logic problem, and it contains shapes which are the basics of geometry. But, I love how it demonstrates dramatically that some people have more of an affinity to spatial problems than others might. That being good at it doesn’t make you “smarter” than some else, but just a different kind of thinker. That same person who has difficulty making that giraffe out of tangrams might be extremely adept at complex algorithms that the rest of us would cringe at! Being good at one thing, but not the other, doesn’t make a person “smarter” or “dumber”; it just makes them different. And differences in our classrooms are not only something that we should acknowledge, but something that we should be proud of and use to our learning advantage.
This was definitely a “group worthy” task! It gives those spatial learners an opportunity to be seen by the group as smart, which is very important to the whole of the entire classroom as they move onto the next group worthy task where those “spatial” kids might need help from the “algorithmic” kids.
Everyone is smart in their own way. I think it’s part of our job as teachers to help each kid realize that.
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