Beading Progress

We have been working with our school board Indigenous Program team to work on a math project. We have been doing loom beading based on designs that students made. They need to be able to talk about the math that they use in their designs once they are finished.

Some of the math that we can see and talk about are:

• number of beads used (area model)
• fraction (ratio, decimal, percent) of beads of a certain colour
• symmetry
• reflections or rotations
• angles
• slopes
• proportional reasoning (e.g. for every pattern repeat of 4 rows we need to add 5 red beads)
• shapes

One student gave each digit from 0-9 a different colour, and then used their beading to express the value of pi. There are so many possibilities with this task!

While working, students are also reminded of teachings shared with us by an Indigenous beader, who spoke about how we need to put good thoughts and intentions into our work, and if we are feeling frustration we need to take a step back and take a break. This skill and self awareness is important for math too, as sometimes we will need to take a break if feeling frustrated.

We also appreciate the teachings about including a spirit bead in our work, either by chance or on purpose. Having a bead out of place is not a disaster, but rather celebrated as a feature to be sought out and discovered, as a way to encourage people to look closely and appreciate the details in the work. In math too we are working to not view mistakes as a disaster, but rather a moment for learning, and something that can be looked at more deeply.

We will need to return to this task in a while to remove our beading from the loom and glue hide to our finished products.