Re: education, technology & chat (The Mathematics of it)

Thanks, again, Bill.
The links were useful. I can see that teacher and child discussions could
develop quite elaborated apprehension of the attributes of the shapes and
compositionality.

I was curious about three things on the easel note. Maybe the talk in the
class allowed the group to address the matters or to dance past them because
another part of the curriculum is going to highlight them. Anyhow, the
first thing was the squares and rectangles in the list of quadrilaterals:
Does it come up that squares are rectangles, that the sort of things that
make a rectangle different from, say, a rhombus is of a different order than
the difference between squares and other rectangles? The second thing was
about the "big, small" and "big, skinny": Are those treated in the talk
more like, say, color (and not mathematized) than they are like, say, side
or point? The third thing is the difference in sophistication of terms
between types of triangles and types of quadrilaterals: If you use
'quadrilateral' doesn't it fairly ooze out that some triangles are
equilateral, and isn't it wonderfully odd that one shape has laterality as
the hypernym but the other uses angularity?

I'm guessing that the so-called correlations to the NCTM standards that they say are provided by Scott Foresman would have the most information about what mathematics learning/development ideas motivate the lesson content; is that so?

Peg