posted on 2020-09-20, 18:12authored byIngrid Schudel
Intended audience: Year three primary school teachers and learners
This video is designed to support cross-curriculum teaching for third year primary school learners. The video uses ‘big numbers’ in mathematics to help learners understand how hard bees work to make honey. The video was inspired by the Mathematical Literacy researcher Terezhina Nunes who has demonstrated the incredible power of children’s mathematical reasoning when not necessarily tied up in formal number representation. You can also extend understanding to help learners to appreciate the importance of biodiversity (bees need flowers at all times of the year) and the importance of bees for pollinating food crops (1 in every 3 mouthfuls of food we eat is from a crop pollinated by bees).
The video is linked to the school curriculum in the following ways: • Mathematics: By Grade 3 learners should “Count confidently, verbally in ones, tens, fives, twos, twenties, twenty-fives, fifties and hundreds to 1000”. This activity extends beyond that – by asking learners to visualise what the number 10 000 might look like. • Life Skills: Science: Learning about ‘animals that help us’ • Language extension possibilities. This video also draws on young children’s passion for numbers. As an extension into Languages you can try and get hold of the book: Guess how much I love You which plays with the delight children find in large numbers.