From recent Natural Math book, “Funville is a math-inspired fantasy adventure by Sasha Fradkin and Allison Bishop, where functions come to life as magical beings.”
What is Natural Math?
Amongst other services, Natural Math produces math curriculum for math circles founded on seven principles. These are:
- MAKE (As in, “Math is what you make of it!”)
- OPENNESS
- ABUNDANCE
- YES, AND
- ADVENTURE
- EASY COMPLEXITY
- BRIDGES
To make fun math content accessible to all, Natural Math works through Creative Commons to make their published material and online courses available through a pay-what-you-can model. Natural Math’s founder, Dr. Maria Droujkova, has developed a thriving network of like minded parents, educators, and community leaders that aim to make quality math education readily available and engaging for all.
Alliance with Natural Math
For the first time this year, Orlando Math Circle has partnered with Natural Math to jointly pursue this shared accessibility mission. One of the activities Natural Math has done with OMC is to teach an online class called Inspired By Calculus, as well as a class called Transformers: Matrices & Graphs for older elementary and middle school students. Can you imagine a 9 year old grappling with matrices?! Well, Natural Math has seen this happen firsthand!
Get Involved!
As our readers know, OMC is about so much more than just math enrichment. It is also a community hub to get students involved in volunteer opportunities that give back to younger children through sharing knowledge, coordinating activities, and serving as role models.
Together with Natural Math, we will be running a mentorship program for our students. Older OMC students (high school and college age mentors) and teachers will collaborate to develop math lessons and activities for elementary students. Maria at Natural Math will take these lesson plans and add in the math bridge, which joins up math ideas and helps students apply these lessons to daily life. She will virtually meet with mentors to discuss and refine the lessons, both before the lesson and after delivery.
Mentors, under Maria’s guidance, will take responsibility for testing the activities together and providing feedback for discussions and modifications. Elementary students, especially young girls, are encouraged to partake as mentees in these specially designed projects that will be led by the mentors. Small group dynamics will ensure learning is highly hands-on and the mentors will have an opportunity to flex their teaching muscles. To make this mentorship model more agile, mentors will gather feedback from the students which they will evaluate to drive lesson plan improvements for subsequent groups.
Over time, these refined math activities will become part of the Natural Math collection of educational content with Maria leading the way as developmental editor. What makes this project even more exciting is the content created here through OMC will be made available online. When the materials are published, participating students will be credited as co-authors! Published technical writing is a great addition to one’s resume. How cool is that?
To get involved, reach out to Orlando Math Circle to express your interest.
From teen author Rachel’s college application essay, “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s injustice. I believe that all children deserve a good education. Educational inequality has been extremely apparent to me after attending an underfunded Philadelphia public school. This desire to eradicate injustice and to give all children access to the best possible education motivates me to engage in this writing and advocacy even when it gets challenging. I see writing this book as an act of sharing the pedagogical wealth by disseminating math circle practices to everyone.”
