Math in Your Feet for Students

WORKSHOPS | RESIDENCIES | ON-SITE

"My class and I absolutely loved the residency. The students and I learned so much about math and dance. I appreciated [Malke's] manner with the students as well as her deep thinking about making real connections to math."- 4th Grade Teacher

First and foremost, Math in Your Feet is an integration of two separate but highly complementary paths of inquiry. Percussive dance is a sophisticated, precise, and physical expression of time and space using foot-based dance patterns. Mathematics has been called both an art as well as the ‘science of patterns’ and initially developed to understand, describe, and manipulate the physical world.

Math in Your Feet leads students through the problem solving process of creating their own percussive dance patterns. Along the way, they increase their understanding of mathematical topics such as congruence, symmetry, transformation, angles and degrees, attributes, categorical variables, manipulation and analysis of complex patterns, mapping on a coordinate grid, as well as deep experience with mathematical practices and problem solving.

Here are some other ways to describe the program:

Low floor, high ceiling (useful and interesting to diverse groups of learners and backgrounds)
Geometry topics
Physical pattern units are useful in coding/computer science classrooms
An in depth inquiry into mathematical patterns including explorations of transformations, symmetries, group theory and equivalence classes
An opportunity to use mathematical language in context.
A chance to build and strengthen spatial reasoning
A chance to harness existing body knowledge (developed through being in the world) to strengthen understanding of mathematical practices and topics.
Potential for developing new insights about previously familiar mathematics.
Inspiration for mathematical question asking in fourth graders and (open-minded) research mathematicians alike.

[All my] students were able to grasp so many different math concepts and a large variety of math vocabulary, while dancing, in a very short amount of time." - 4th Grade Teacher

"MIYF really helped me with geometry. I understand all the flips and turns as well as symmetry so much better." - 5th Grader

“I like all the things you taught us when we were in there, but what I like best was that you were allways (sic) excited with what we had did in our patterns. I am happy we learned this and thank you.” - 4th Grader