Entrance Slip # 4: Birch Bark Biting

Image source: http://www.isuma.tv/aboriginal-perspectives/rosella-carney-birch-bark-biting-photos

I think involving the body/other senses in teaching math is a wonderful idea. While reading about birch bark biting, I tried to compare it to my experience with learning symmetry, transformations, and proportions. While I mostly dealt with graphs, colouring in boxes, or cutting out shapes and moving them around, they were all actions done on something separate from me. Birch bark biting would require creating patterns through a different medium. That in itself would likely make a larger impression on students, which is then amplified by using different senses. While you do touch the paper and move shapes if they're cut out, holding the bark and folding it would be a stronger use of touch because bark feels more tangible and has a different texture than paper. Additionally, using teeth to bite into the bark makes use of taste senses and has an additional variable in terms of how hard you bite into the bark. Birch bark biting is also an Indigenous activity which is tied to the culture and practices, so the activity itself is more meaningful in general (not to mention beautiful). 

I thought it was interesting that through working on this activity, students started by creating shapes without a clear goal in mind but slowly began developing their own ideas about what kind of shapes they wanted to create. This in turn meant they started developing their skills in symmetry, transformations, and proportions through hypotheses, experimentation, and logical thought based on their findings. I believe this is proof that sensory activities like these connect students with the concepts in a stronger and more meaningful way. I recall a lesson on waves in physics where we had to physically move and imitate the motion of a wave in order to complete an experiment. In this way, we were embodying and experiencing the subject instead of learning about it outside of ourselves. Another activity in which we used different senses was in Hindi class. We were learning how to pronounce a certain line of letters and it required us to move our tongues further back and make them touch the tops of our mouths. To ensure we did this correctly, our professor made us wash/sanitize our hands, and then physically push our tongues with our fingers to the proper spot. Because of this activity, I am much more aware of the way I pronounce words requiring those letters and pronounce them with a higher rate of accuracy. This made me wonder about muscle memory. Do sensory activities stay with us more because our bodies are remembering the feeling of going through that motion? Or is it more to do with the fact that activities break classroom routine and are therefore more memorable?