I don't know about you, but my household has a definite case of the wiggles lately. We're a family that normally spends our evenings at the gym or communal pool, so their current closures have hit us hard. For a while, we became a bit restless and started taking more walks! But when we headed out for our fourth walk of the day a few weeks back, even our puppy looked at us like, "really?"
Mom, please! No more walks!
After some serious thought about how to stay active, I returned to one of my great loves—dance! It started with some solo stretching and instructional videos in the garage, but now the whole family's in on it. Every day after work, we turn on some upbeat music and spend 20-30 minutes wiggling, grooving, and bopping. And yes—the puppy joins us with some leaps and tail shimmies.
In honor of it being International Dance Day, I wanted to combine my love for dance and mathematics, and share it with you. You won't find any recordings of my dance parties in this post though. That would be far too embarrassing. Luckily, my friend and colleague Nina is a professional dancer! She's also a content designer here at MIND Research Institute and has some great ideas on how you can discover math through movement.
She's provided two activities you can implement with your kids—or on your own! Here's an introduction.
Nina's first activity is all about angles: right, acute, and obtuse. As you move your arms, legs, and torso in different ways, how many angles can you find? What kind of angles are they? How many angles can you make at once?
The second activity encourages us to get our digit dance on! What exactly does that mean? Well, you'll have to watch the video to find out. But things are about to get irrational!
Here's Nina one more time to sum up her activities and encourage you to move with math today for International Dance Day—and every day!
If your kids or you decide to try out one of the activities above, we'd love to see your sweet moves! You can share photos and videos with us on Twitter by tagging @MIND_Research and #MathMINDs. We can't wait to see how you incorporate math into your International Dance Day celebration!
Nina and our colleague Brandon Smith, Lead Mathematician and Product Director, will dive even deeper into movement with math in an upcoming installment of our Developing Our MathMINDs series. Until then, check out the first two weeks of the series for even more conversations and resources about math.
Kelsey Skaggs was the Communications Manager at MIND Education. She enjoys highlighting the work of colleagues and partners who champion MIND's mission.
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