Multisensory Activity: Taste the Ratio (Skittles)

While working with a handful of Skittles, I began thinking about how this task could be redesigned through the lens of tactile and sensory access, as discussed in Stylianidou and Nardi (2019). Inspired by their work with blind and sighted pupils, I imagined an activity where students would temporarily blindfold themselves and engage with the mathematics through taste rather than colour.

In this version of the task, students would taste the Skittles and describe them by flavour rather than colour. For example, brown could be described as berry punch, blue as raspberry, green as melon berry, red as wild cherry, and orange as strawberry. The focus shifts from visual identification to sensory discrimination and language.

Students would then engage in a “Taste the Ratio” activity. They would identify ratios (for example, berry punch to raspberry), predict how different ratios might affect the overall taste, and combine Skittles to create ratios such as 2:3 or 1:4. Students could explore equivalent ratios by scaling their mixtures and compare how the taste changes as proportions change.

Mathematically, this task supports reasoning about ratios, equivalence, and scaling. Conceptually, it reframes ratio as something that can be experienced, not just calculated. The sweetness of the task is intentional—engagement, pleasure, and curiosity become part of the mathematical experience rather than distractions from it.

This activity directly reflects the argument made by Stylianidou and Nardi (2019): when learning experiences are designed to work without relying on a single sense, they benefit all learners. Blindfolding the class removes vision as the dominant sense, allowing all students to participate in the same way. Rather than creating a special accommodation for students with visual impairments, the task becomes universally designed, supporting inclusion while also expanding how sighted students understand mathematical relationships.

In this way, the task challenges ableist assumptions about how mathematics must be accessed and demonstrates how multisensory experiences can lead to deeper, more meaningful, and more lasting mathematical understanding.

 

EDCP 553 – Week 2

Article Summary

Stylianidou & Nardi (2019): Tactile Construction of Mathematical Meaning

Stylianidou and Nardi argue that tactile mathematics should not be viewed only as an accommodation for visually impaired (VI) students, but as a universally designed approach that benefits all learners. Through a shared tactile task in a Year 5 classroom, both VI and sighted students explored shapes using touch rather than vision. The authors found that tactile perception supported deeper mathematical meaning-making, revealed features of shapes that vision alone sometimes obscured, and allowed VI students to contribute mathematically rich ideas that were taken up by the class.

The study challenges ableist assumptions about mathematical competence by showing that when mathematics is designed to be accessed through multiple senses, it expands how all students can think, reason, and communicate mathematically. The authors conclude that tactile, embodied approaches should be seen as a strength of inclusive mathematics classrooms rather than a special provision for a few.

 

Stop While Reading

While reading this article, I kept thinking about the idea that things built out of necessity often end up supporting everyone. Innovations created for people with disabilities are not limited to those who “need” them; instead, they frequently improve experiences for the general population. The examples in this paper clearly showed that tactile tasks designed with visually impaired students in mind also helped sighted students notice mathematical features they had previously missed.

This made me reflect on how often classrooms treat accommodations as separate or additional, rather than as opportunities to rethink learning for everyone. The findings reinforced my belief that when we intentionally design learning experiences to be accessible, we are not lowering expectations, we are deepening understanding for all learners.

 

Stop While Reading

Another moment that stood out to me was thinking about how mathematics can be understood through different senses. In the study, sighted students benefited from touch, and the visually impaired student offered a powerful, embodied description of shape based on movement and imagination. This made me think about the videos we watched this week, where mathematics was expressed through food, folding, and motion.

I began to wonder how these experiences might work across different sensory losses. Someone without hearing could still understand vectors or hexaflexagons through visual and physical demonstration. Someone with limited vision could potentially recreate these ideas through careful listening and tactile exploration. This reinforced for me that the more senses we bring into learning, the more meaningful, powerful, and intellectually lasting mathematical understanding can become.

Week 1 – Mathematics and the Body: Seeing the Graph and Being the Graph

1.  Embodied Measurement: 

      Calibrating My Body 

 

This week began with calibrating my own body as a measurement system.
I recorded my handspan, cubit, fathom, pace, and other body-based units, and noticed how these “ancient” measures immediately made mathematics relational and personal. Rather than starting with centimetres and metres, I began with myself as the unit, a reminder that measurement is not neutral, but deeply human and cultural.

Measuring the World: My Garden Beds Dreaming about Summar!

I then used my full embodied measurement system to measure the garden beds I built from old railway ties. Each bed is approximately 3 fathoms long, ¾ of a fathom wide, and just under a cubit high a space I can feel, walk, and reach. What used to be “16 × 4 × 2 feet” is now something I know with my arms, steps, and body. I wasn’t just measuring the space; I was inhabiting it. This helped me see how abstraction grows out of experience, rather than replacing it.

Reading Summary:

Gerofsky (2011), Chapter 18

Seeing the Graph and Being the Graph

In Chapter 18, Gerofsky (2011) explores how students come to understand graphs not only by seeing them, but by being them. She shows how gesture and movement help learners connect the changing horizontal values (x) with the changing vertical values (y), long before they can articulate this relationship formally. Gesture becomes a bridge to abstraction. Students trace, sweep, point, and move to express variation, slope, and change turning the body into a living coordinate plane. Rather than gesture being a “crutch,” Gerofsky shows it as a powerful generator of mathematical meaning.

Video Reflections: 

Roger Antonsen – Math is the Hidden Secret to Understanding the World

My “Stops”

Stop 1 – Patterns and Representation

Antonsen’s central idea that “math is about patterns and connections” stopped me immediately. I loved how he showed that mathematics is not about formulas first, but about noticing relationships, and then representing them in multiple ways. This is written into our curriculum but rarely understood to this depth. The space to ask questions, to wonder, to play with patterns, and to engage in dialogue is often missing. When Antonsen said this is where we get to do “the cool stuff,” I felt that deeply, because that is exactly where students begin to see themselves as mathematicians.

Stop 2 – Embodiment and Meaning

What struck me most is how naturally Antonsen connected mathematics to the human experience. His talk affirmed that abstraction is not the goal, meaning is.
Abstraction is simply one way of expressing that meaning once it has been lived, felt, and explored.

Connections to My Practice: 

Being the Graph

Gerofsky’s work immediately connected to a project I did with Grade 7 and 8 students where we built a life-size Cartesian plane using a tarp and tape. Students represented their yard sites on this giant coordinate grid, with the school as (0,0). In Grade 7 they created two-dimensional drawings, and in Grade 8 three-dimensional nets, then plotted themselves across the four quadrants. Reading about gesture helped me see why this worked: students were not just reading a graph; they were living inside it. 

Another powerful stop was Gerofsky’s idea of using the body itself as the graph, with the navel as (0,0). I had never considered the body as a coordinate plane, and yet it makes perfect sense. The younger students in her study used finger movements and gestures to represent complex relationships that would otherwise be inaccessible. Their bodies carried the mathematics before the symbols ever could.

Final Reflection: 

Why This Matters

This week reminded me that embodied mathematics is not “extra.” It is foundational. When students move, gesture, build, and measure, they are not avoiding abstraction, they are building it. Gerofsky and Antonsen helped me see that mathematics becomes powerful when we create space for experience, dialogue, and pattern-seeking, and when we trust the body as a legitimate mathematical tool.