Dear Readers,
The first issue of the year 2025! Not so new, now that we are three months, a quarter of the year and one winter away from the old! In the break between the November 2024 and March 2025 issue, Padmapriya Shirali and I spent a few days in some of the schools in Chamarajanagar district (Karnataka) and Bhopal and Damoh districts (Madhya Pradesh) that the Azim Premji Foundation interacts with. Our return to classrooms and our interactions with teachers and students were delightful and thought provoking and we came back buzzing with ideas and determined to build on the energy and enthusiasm of the children and their teachers. Editors Rudresh and Sandeep Diwakar coordinated our visits and it was heartening to see how teachers and students welcomed the Foundation’s presence in the classroom and how deeply our Resource Persons were connected with the Field. We plan to do this more often – you will be seeing a lot of responses to questions, ideas for articles and suggestions to address misconceptions in this and upcoming issues of At Right Angles.
In the March 2024 issue, we had covered the features of the new class 1 and class 2 mathematics textbooks. We open this issue with a look at how these have been received and used in classrooms across India. How has this influenced the pedagogy? How easy has the material been to transact? What are the welcome changes? What is missing? With detailed input from teacher Sonia Kundu, Kshama Chakravarthy bases this article on several conversations with teachers, reports on classroom transactions and feedback from a painstaking survey conducted across states from Karnataka to Uttarakhand.
In the Classroom section, we bring you several vignettes from classrooms – planning of lessons and facilitated discussions by Rahul Singh Rathore and Jagrati Mehra that led to deeper conceptual understanding of Circles and Patterns. Shekh Mohammed Zahid shares insights on crafting questions that are deeper, assessing both a student’s understanding as well as misconceptions – several examples are given along with some guidelines on how to do this in other topics. Kshama completes her series on Montessori materials – their features, the learning intentions – you are also provided with links to Math Space which teach us how to develop low cost versions of these.
Number Wheels and a modified Uno Game! What more do you need to explore the Joy of Mathematics! Have fun reading and experimenting and if you develop versions that lead to more learning through play, observation, discussion and documentation, do send in your pictures and ideas to us.
Children’s fiction with a mathematical angle – Manisha Goyal describes a series by a Japanese writer (Anno) that can be plumbed for mathematical content and she describes in detail how she did just that in her classrooms. There are many more ideas in the Review, and I would encourage you to read the story online. His visuals are so rich, each of them can help your students understand counting, place value, mathematical operations, budgeting, planning and many more useful life skills!
We also do a comparative review this time – materials that are used to teach numeracy, how and when to use their features, these are systematically listed by Math Space.
The Pullout was inspired by Resource Person Sowmya N from Chamarajanagar who asked Padmapriya for ideas on introducing Algebra. We hope you benefit from her query and we encourage you all to share such requests.
Send your feedback, questions, ideas to AtRightAngles.editor@apu.edu.in We would love to hear from you.
Warm regards,
Sneha Titus
Chief Editor, At Right Angles.
