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The students in Molly James’s kindergarten classroom were tasked with creating a mathematical art gallery. They had each drawn a number and then searched for two types objects they could use to compose a visual number sentence — such as two rulers plus three scissors to equal five objects.
After photographing and mounting their pictures on the wall in numerical order, the students sat on the floor with their sketchbooks and began to draw and talk. “I had expected them to learn something about number composition,” James said, “but I didn’t expect the remarkable observations they began to have about the photographs.” For example, when one girl looked at a picture of two red scissors and three blue scissors (2+3=5), she noticed that the direction of the handles gave rise to a new number sentence: 4 scissors pointing left + 1 scissor pointing right = 5 scissors.
James, who recently published a paper about creativity in the classroom, said moments like these remind her that “creativity is not fluff or an add-on, but is instead an essential part of what it means to be a mathematician.” In fact, she believes creativity is the key to helping her students become confident and skilled mathematical thinkers.
