Week 5: Developing mathematics pedagogies that integrate embodied, multisensory, outdoors and arts-based modalities

 Kelton and Ma’s article explores how mathematical understanding shifts when classroom space is reconfigured to allow whole-body, multi-party collaboration. Rather than treating mathematics as a silent, individual, desk-bound activity, they argue that meaning can emerge through coordinated movement, shared attention, and spatial interaction. The authors emphasize that embodied activity must remain mathematically purposeful movement is not an add-on or substitute for mathematics, but a medium through which structure can become perceptible. When learners negotiate rhythm, position, gesture, or material together, cognitive load is redistributed across bodies and space. In this way, abstraction grows out of participation rather than preceding it.

Stop 1

My first “stop” in engaging with this idea came while watching the dance video. As Sarah Chase layered 3 against 2 rhythmically, I became aware of my own discomfort. I could calculate 3 and 2 symbolically without hesitation yet holding those rhythms simultaneously in my body felt complex and disorienting. I realized that I would need to map the structure or create a visual guide to stabilize it. That moment made me understand something important: embodiment reveals structure, but I personally need representation to organize layered patterns. This tension between bodily experience and structural mapping became the kernel for my exploration.

Stop 2

The second stop occurred when I began thinking about cycles more broadly. The dancer’s layered movements reminded me of seasonal rhythms and how time might have been measured historically through repeated embodied observation before symbolic notation existed. The idea that alignment, when patterns coincide, could signal meaning connected directly to mathematical periodicity. In both natural cycles and rhythmic dance, repetition and return carry structure.

Stop 3

The third stop emerged as I considered prime numbers. If rhythms like 3 and 2 eventually align, what happens when the numbers share no common factors? The idea of working with 5 and 7, both prime, intrigued me because their patterns would only coincide at a larger interval. This heightened the visibility of least common multiple as structural alignment rather than procedure.                                                                                     

 

 

 

  

 

My Vintage C- Rods 

Stop 4

The fourth stop was material. Knowing I needed a way to externalize the rhythm, I turned to Cuisenaire rods. The rods allowed me to “freeze” movement into colour and length, transforming dynamic rhythm into tangible structure.

For my activity, I selected 5 (yellow) and 7 (black). Instead of using the single rods, I decomposed each number. I constructed 5 as 3 + 1 + 1 (a green rod and two white rods), and 7 as 4 + 2 + 1 (a pink rod, a red rod, and a white rod). I then built two horizontal trains, extending each repeatedly and lining them up side by side. As the trains grew, the coloured sequences repeated. Eventually, both trains aligned at a total length of 35. At that moment, the patterns coincided, and the sequence would begin again. What the dancer embodied as layered rhythm, I could now see and touch as periodic structure. The least common multiple was no longer an algorithm; it was a moment of visible alignment.

 

 

Cuisenaire rods were developed in the early 1950s by Belgian teacher Georges Cuisenaire as a way to help students discover number relationships concretely. Later popularized by Caleb Gattegno, the rods were designed not as counting tools but as relational tools. Each colour corresponds to a fixed length: white (1), red (2), light green (3), purple/pink (4), yellow (5), dark green (6), black (7), brown (8), blue (9), orange (10). The colours are intentionally distinct and not scaled in a visually obvious gradient, encouraging proportional reasoning rather than visual guessing. From their origins, the rods were meant to reveal structure, equivalence, factors, multiples, ratios, through comparison and construction. In my exploration, they functioned as materialized rhythm, redistributing cognitive load into space, much like Kelton and Ma describe.

Finally, this exploration brought me back to sweetgrass weaving. Braiding sweetgrass involves three strands crossing in a repeated and ordered sequence. Strength emerges through structured interweaving and return. Just as 5 and 7 create a repeating cycle that eventually aligns at 35, the strands of sweetgrass cross and return in predictable rhythm. The rods’ coloured trains echo that visual and structural repetition. In both weaving and mathematics, pattern is not decorative, it is generative. Embodied movement, material representation, and cultural practice converge through structure. In moving from dance to rods to written explanation and finally to weaving, I experienced how embodied inquiry can lead to deeper mathematical meaning without sacrificing rigor.