Posts

Showing posts from February, 2017

Numeracy and Historical Thinking - Timeline with attitude

Image
With much of the professional development focus on numeracy in Ontario this year, I've been contemplating the connections between numeracy and historical thinking. There are the obvious statistics and graphs that we all use to unpack historical content, such as this graph from    Canadian Sources Investigated: The enlistments (green) and the casualties (purple) for the months of 1917 is a great example of how we often think of "numeracy." Students need to interpret and understand the "content" and implications of it. This is great! While these types of activities are a necessary and excellent part of understanding the events of the past, alone, they are not yet really historical thinking.  What I've really been wondering is how do numeracy skills and concepts overlap or converge with the historical thinking concepts ? Earlier this year, one of my more numerate colleagues shared some of her realizations from a lesson study observation, whe