Math Picture Walks

During guided reading sessions, we work to stimulate the curiosity of our students by going through a “picture walk.”  Even before we open a book, we show the children the cover, read the title, and ask them what they think the text might be about based on what they see.  We work to pique their interest, help our students visualize, and make connections to promote greater meaning.  We can do the same with mathematical picture walks through math texts and math related stories.  Pointing out graphs, diagrams, and picture representations of math concepts will help our students see that mathematical ideas can be represented in many different ways.

Math guru Laney Sammons tells us, “Providing opportunities to examine visual depictions of mathematical concepts builds the base of knowledge students need to create mental images of the concepts they encounter during their math work.”  When reading, our young mathematicians will often skip over diagrams and illustrations, so it is helpful for us to model how important it is to use those tools.

While taking a “picture walk” we can model the thought processes involved.  Laney suggests focusing on the following questions:

• What math idea is the diagram or visual showing?
• What do the details represent?
• Why do you think the author used these pictures to represent this idea?
• Is this visual effective for you?  Does it give you greater understanding?
• Are there other ways you could represent this math idea?  How would you do it?

Stop and think about a math concept and see how many different representations you can make for that mathematical idea.  Share with your students how you built this skill and model a variety of examples.  Deliberately teaching this strategy helps our students to develop the ability to create multiple ways to show what they know – and in the process – build deeper understanding.   By looking at the visuals in texts, we can help our growing mathematicians build background knowledge that they will be able to draw upon in the future.  With practice, they will be able to create mental pictures of new math concepts and be more independent problem solvers.

Here are a few other strategies for using visualization when teaching math:

http://www.weareteachers.com/4-strategies-to-help-kids-understand-math-using-visualization/