Thank you to Richland Academy’s Inquiry Animator and Grade 4 and 5 Math Teacher, Ms. Megan Pearson, for sharing her insights and the inspired math work of her students with Inquiry Minds.  We welcome your feedback!

“’Innovation must be part and parcel of the ordinary, the norm, if not routine.’ This presents a formidable new challenge: how to develop citizens who not only possess up-to-date knowledge but are able to participate in the creation of new knowledge as a normal part of their lives.” –Scardemalia and Bereiter

Sal Khan, creator of Khan Academy has thousands of videos that explain all kinds of concepts in math, science and even history!  By breaking down concepts into step by step instructions, with examples, he makes difficult to understand ideas, understandable.

During some parts of our math program, the Grades 4 and 5 classes “flipped the classroom,” using Khan Academy videos at home for instruction, and using class time for collaborative and individual practice.  Using a program called Educreations, students are creating their own Khan Academy–style videos, explaining and breaking down how to convert units of measurement, a concept they have struggled to gain a full understanding of. By thinking about how we might teach a concept, we also examine how we, and others, might better learn and understand it, because we are forced to deconstruct and examine its parts more closely than we may have otherwise been inclined to do.