On Process & Properties: Notice & Wonder, Day 3

Kids practicing their math/dance patterns on my dance board before we started class this morning.

The room was hot all day. The kids were overly concerned about things being fair in terms of who got to show their work. They were also a bit squirrel-y (and my focus could have been better) but we all worked hard on the process of creating a second 4-beat pattern, Pattern B.

The math involved in today's activities included: 
- observing and comparing moving patterns and identifying relevant properties
- increased focus on using precise language to describe the math/dance steps
- increased emphasis on focusing/identifying one relevant property at a time in the dancing (movement, foot position, direction)
- continued growth in understanding and noticing sameness in the dancing (unison/congruence) including rights and lefts for foot placement and for direction of turns

My takeaway on today:
Compared to other days, this day was a huge challenge (in a good way). I have always known that Pattern B is challenging, even without hearing what the kids noticed. But their notices were so full of details today, way more than the first few days, about the process of making a new pattern as different as possible from their first pattern.

My wonder from today: 
I'm still pondering what to do with these noticings. It's already a great tool for assessing what and how they're thinking about the material. But I keep thinking there has to be something specific I can *do* with this information. And then I think that maybe that the explicit process of reflecting like this is helpful in itself for my learners, but I can't quite put my finger on why that might be exactly. So, for now, I will be content with what I have and look forward to the final two days of this residency.

In case you're interested, my original wonderings/goals re: adding Notice/Wonder to how I facilitate Math in Your Feet can be found here.  
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WHAT THEY NOTICED....

Observations on process
- We had to do two patterns so people had to know Pattern A and Pattern B and it's confusing...they have to know which one.
- [Me and my partner] would share our ideas and then we would do them all and then figure out which one was the easiest and the one we could do all together.
- It was hard because of the turns [So you gave your self a challenging pattern?]  Yep.
- Pattern B took more time [to make] because we had to come up with different ideas and if we had two or more turns we had to do less
- The first time I did it wrong and the second time I did it right.
- It's hard to do the same thing as your partner.
- We got confused a lot and we stepped on teach others feet and we got confused. [Why?] Because we kept on changing it and sometimes we'd remember A and mess up Pattern B.
- It doesn't take long to decide on a Pattern B if you talk and give ideas out to your partner.
- It was really loud in here when we were creating Pattern B
- Our Pattern B was very easy [to dance]
- We had to change our Pattern B because our first one was too hard. [What made it hard for you?]  We did all this tricky stuff and turned around a lot and crossed our feet a lot and it got hard so we changed it.
- Our slide had good sound but we need to work on the sound for the step
- People were making mistakes which is a good thing because if you make a mistake it's a FAIL which is a "first attempt in learning.
- I heard people being respectful to each other
- People were messing around

Observations on properties and equivalence (sameness and difference)
- Some people had jumps in Pattern A but in Pattern B they had turns and slides
- There was a lot of 90 degree turns
- We couldn't do the same pattern on Pattern B. We had to be different
- A lot of people came up with really different B patterns [compared to Pattern A]
- If people had lots of spins in Pattern A they did not do a lot of spins in Pattern B
- Everybody jumped at least once in Pattern B
- We did the same beats and the same feet for this pattern
- It took us a long time to get our B fully finished

WONDERS (similar to yesterday; I'm including the ones that stood out to me)
- I wonder what the rules are for [making] Pattern C?
- If every partner can agree with the other partner. [So, were you noticing that you were having some difficulties?]  Ummm...a little. [Did you guys come up with a Pattern B?]  Yeah.
- If everybody's A and B patterns will go good together?