We tend to be afraid of failure, but I think failure can actually be a good thing, too.
~ words from Mario that keep us thinking and wondering ~
Not hers. Not yours. People are always more than the chapters anyone could share. Hold what is here gently. Approach with curiosity, before judgment.
Notice what you notice. Wonder what you wonder. There is no quiz, no right way. Read until something stays.
this film has no words. notice what you notice. notice what you wonder. wonder out loud. and don't forget to notice what you feel, too.
Creative Design
I bet you’ve used some creative thinking to problem solve in your classroom or at your home. Can you draw a picture or write a short story about a time that creative thinking helped you? Or maybe your class has a problem needing solved right now and you could all brainstorm some creative solutions together!
Do you think it is important to support your community? Why or why not? Can you brainstorm a list of benefits to living in a community? Now let’s think outside our community. Why might it be important to support people in other communities around the world?
Have you ever come up with a creative new way to use an everyday product? Tell me about your own ideas! Who would your invention benefit? Why is it important in your community? Something I’ve learned is that it is important for Maya Pedal to be responding to a need: we need less expensive, reliable sources of power and so we came up with a solution! What is a need you see? Can you brainstorm a list of needs with your classmates? Then work backward to come up with a business idea that offers a solution!
When Marta ground her corn by hand, she could only grind 2 buckets of corn a day. Now, with her bici-maquina, she can grind 6 buckets of corn in a day! Can you draw a multiplication table to illustrate how many buckets she can grind with each tool in one week? How could we use this to explain to people some of the benefits of bici-maquinas?
Now I need your help writing a couple fractions. Marta’s neighbor has asked for her help in grinding 12 buckets of corn for a special event. The neighbor is wondering, how much will be done after the first day by using the bici-maquina? What about by hand? How can you calculate how many days it will take to grind this corn with each tool?
Has anyone ever told you they didn't like one of your ideas? Did you turn that into a positive conversation? Has an idea of yours ever failed? We tend to be afraid of failure, like answering a question wrong, or doing something incorrectly that our mom asked us to do. But I think failure can actually be a good thing, too. What are some reasons failure can sometimes be a good thing? What is something you’ve learned from a time that things went wrong?
Want to create a focused space? Ask students to close their eyes and visualize themselfves riding a bike.
“Where do you think all the stuff we use comes from? What goes into making it, and how does it get onto our plate or into our closet?” Guide students into a group discussion to help them start thinking about the effects of their consumption far beyond their personal lives.
Encourage them to think about the different components of each “stuff” thing you discuss to explore how far-reaching our products and impact can be. You could also tie this lesson in with exploring, The Story of Stuff.
“We often use tools or machines for just one purpose, but with creativity, we can find new uses. What are some objects in your classroom or at home that you could use in an unexpected way?" Ask students to see everyday objects in a new light.
A milk carton can become a bird feeder. Banana peels can become fertilizer. A bottle of water built into the wall can become a light bulb. Begin with an open discussion, asking students to offer up their own ideas. Brainstorm this a bit, then watch I am Mario and read “Mario Repurposes Bikes.” Revisit the question and see if they gained new inspiration. Consider breaking students into groups and assigning them one object, then encouraging them to dream up new uses for that particular item. Center on Mario’s bike-machines described in the Learning Journey. Discuss with your group, “Do you have any other ideas for creative uses of every-day items? How are the people in Mario's community resourceful? What do you think of their approach to businesses? What are some lessons we can take from Mario's village in Guatemala?"
Now that your students have imagined sustainable designs, let's revisit how Marta uses her bici-maquina to grind corn.
Start by asking your students, “What are some ideas you have for things that may help Mario explain to new customers why the bici-maquina is so useful?” After sharing some ideas, tell them you’re going to do some calculations that Mario could use when communicating with potential customers. You could split the class into two groups; half the class could work on creating a multiplication table that illustrates how many buckets of corn Marta can grind in a week by hand and by using the bici-maquina. The other half of the class could work on calculating how long it would take to grind the neighbor’s 12 buckets of corn by hand and by the bici-maquina, also showing in fraction form how much would be completed in one day. Then have each group explain to the other the tools and concepts they used to solve their problem. Lead a debrief discussion on how each group’s tools could help the other group’s problem, exploring the relationship between multiplication and division. Variations could be created by changing the numbers and by suggesting the neighbor uses cans smaller than buckets, creating an opportunity to compare fractions of different wholes.
After helping Marta with math, take a step back and ask students how they might use fractions in their own lives. You could provide examples from your life as well.
Discuss with the group, “Why is it helpful to know fractions? What are some areas in your own life where knowing these skills might come in handy one day?"
This is one way to teach this story. You could also weave your own way, threading two or three other people the AI finds for you alongside.
Want to weave a full lesson around this story?
The weaver finds 3-4 real people whose stories thread together with this one.
Weave a lesson →Resourceful Community
Buenos días! Good morning! My name is Mario Juárez. I live in Guatemala, which is a small Spanish-speaking country in Central America. Did you find it on the map? I’m excited to tell you about my family. I have a wife, a teenage son and two younger daughters. We live in rural town called San Andrés Itzapa (“eetz-ah-pah”). The town sits in a valley surrounded by mountains and covered in forests. There are all types of plants and trees in my area, such as aloe and eucalyptus and pine trees. About 32,000 people live here, and our community is very tight-knit and friendly. We call ourselves Itzapecos (“eetz-sah-peck-ohs”).
Do you know which plants are native to your area?
Even if you live in a big city, I bet you can find some native plants!
A lot of ours are even good to make medicine; for example, aloe can be used to help sunburns and dry skin!
How about you research plants from your area and then tell me about them?
Many people here, including my family, are of Maya descent. That means our roots trace back to the indigenous Maya civilization, which existed for thousands of years in parts of Mexico and Central America. We are proud of our indigenous culture in Guatemala. There are more than 20 separate Mayan languages still spoken throughout the country, especially in rural areas. In my town, many people speak the Mayan language Kaqchiquel (“kah-chee-kwel”). That makes us bilingual, meaning we can speak two languages. Our children even learn Kaqchiquel in public school. If you walk around the town, you will probably see women wearing beautiful hand-woven skirts and shawls with colorful indigenous designs.
In Guatemala, our different languages and ancient cultures are part of what makes each region special.
Which languages and cultures are in your community?
Does your town or state also have a nickname for its residents?
We are very proud of our diversity and culture.
How do you feel about your community?
Our town is rich in culture, but we are not rich when it comes to money. There are many reasons for this. A lot of the best farming land is owned by only a few companies or families. This means the indigenous farmers are left with small plots of weak soil, so it’s harder to earn a living by growing crops. There aren’t many big businesses in the rural areas, either. Most of them are in the cities, which have the country’s best roads, bridges, hospitals, electric poles, drinking water systems -- things we call “infrastructure.” Because businesses are in the cities, we don’t have as many jobs available in rural areas. It can take hours to get to the best hospitals. I am lucky to have a job with the non-profit organization Maya Pedal, which turns bicycles into machines that people can use for all types of things: to make smoothies, to grind chicken feed, to pump water, or to sharpen knives. Some of my neighbors earn a little income by growing small crops of wheat, cotton, corn, and beans. We also have a lot of artisans who make hand-crafted goods like leather sandals, wooden tables and chairs, or lovely jewelry with bright green jade gems. We work hard and make great products. But sometimes small farmers just can’t compete with big farming companies, or we can’t find people to buy our handicrafts. That’s why it’s important for me to try and create new job opportunities through my organization.
Often, people might want to work but don’t have many good options for finding jobs.
What are the types of jobs that people have in your community?
What are some ways that you think communities can create jobs?
Think about the type of work your parents or older relatives might do.
What type of work might you like to do someday?
Because my family and our neighbors don’t earn a lot of money, we try to be mindful of how many resources we use. Sometimes we only make the equivalent to 2 or 3 dollars in the United States a day (USD). That’s usually just enough to buy food, some clothes and school supplies. It makes it harder to pay for services like drinking water and electricity, which are very expensive in my community. That’s because it takes more time to deliver them to rural areas, and because we don’t have good infrastructure like in the cities. An electric bill can cost as much as 40 dollars a month! Diesel fuel also costs a lot of money, so not everybody can have a car or an electric generator. Since we’re in a rural area, these resources are hard to come by. So we learn to make do with less.
In Guatemala, our money is called “Quetzal.” One dollar from the United States is about $7.50 quetzales. Let’s just talk in terms of USD though, or you could calculate how much your dollar is worth in quetzal! Although two or three dollars a day isn’t much in Guatemala, I wonder if it goes further than two or three US dollars where you live? Have you ever heard someone say, “It’s all relative?” This is the type of thing they’re referring to. We can use fractions to help us understand how 2 or 3 dollars is relative to each of our communities!
Can you help me? In my village, I can buy three apples for 25 cents. Can you write a fraction to show how much of my 2 dollar salary would be spent on apples? Now let’s say that in your town, you can buy three apples for $2.00. How much of your two dollars would be spent on apples? How many apples can I buy with two dollars? What about you? How does this help us understand relativity? How could you use a number line to think about this?
In a richer country, people might leave their lights on all the time or let the faucet run as they brush their teeth. In Guatemala, we don’t have that option. Since electricity is expensive, my family only turns the lights at night or when we really need to use it, to help save money. We have running water, but in more rural areas, there might not be a system to bring tap water into your house. If you have to buy it from the store every week, or pump it from a well, you want to use as little as needed to save time and money. But there are other reasons not to waste our resources besides just money.
A lot of electricity in the world comes from power plants that burn coal, natural gas and oil. These produce greenhouse gas emissions, which pollute the air and harm the environment. If you waste electricity, then you create unnecessary emissions. Wasting water is a problem because many places in the world could run out of fresh drinking water in just a few decades. In Guatemala, we recently suffered a big drought that ruined lots of crops and made it harder for families to get clean water. If we use less water during good times, then we’ll have enough to use during periods of drought or shortages.
Many Guatemalans are growing more concerned about environmental changes because we see them affecting our daily lives.
Have you noticed differences where you live?
How do you use electricity and water at school and at home?
Brainstorm how you might be able to use less resources; maybe a checklist could help!
--
“All around the world, community exists in many different forms. What are some different forms of community you’ve observed? What does your community mean to you?” Encourage your students to think creatively about community.
It could be a community as small as your classroom or as big as the world. Perhaps you brainstorm a list on the board. You could also ask each student to draw a picture of their community; hang onto that picture for the end of the lesson, or welcome students who want to share to stand up and present their picture. You might ask the class, “What is important to you about your community?” or “What makes a community?”
Watch I am Mario and read the accompanying Learning Journey story, also called, “I am Mario.” Explore how communities not only differ in culture and languages, but also in the way we use resources.
Things like electricity, water, or our garbage and recycling systems might look different from one place to the next. Help your students to think more specifically about resource consumption within their own communities. Perhaps you give students a daily assignment, like to count the number of times they use the sink, flush a toilet or turn on the lights throughout the day. You could integrate math by graphing the changes in their usage over the course of a week. You could also start a classroom-wide research exercise that pushes students to find out the source of their electricity (i.e. utility company, types of energy used in power plants) or the community’s water supplies. You could ask the class, “What are steps we can take to reduce our use of electricity or water, or to increase our recycling?” Mario talks about his concerns for the environment and how changes in climate impact their lives. As a class, you could begin to track weekly weather using various methods, like picture graphs or bar graphs. You could research weather patterns from the past and represent them visually to compare. You could also collaborate with educators at higher grades so that students continue with the comparison over the years. Ask the students, “How can math help us understand changes in our climate?”
Now that your students have explored what defines a community and how our resource uses differ, let’s do some math on Guatemalan wages.
You could split your students into groups, or work as a class, to figure out how to buy groceries on a typical Guatemalan wage of $2-3 USD (7.5 quetzal) per day. This could incorporate lessons on equivalent fractions, fractions on the number line, and fractions and whole numbers. You could incorporate physical objects to help students visualize the exchanges: paper bills and coins, plastic fruits, etc. You could also use these objects to show what a shopper in Guatemala could buy for $2, versus a shopper in a country that uses USD. To make the math a little harder, you could ask the students to calculate how many dollars in USD is relevant to $2 USD in Guatemala by using the fraction they found earlier. Something like this: in Guatemala they spend 1⁄4 of their daily salary on 3 apples. If the $2.00 you spent on three apples was also 1⁄4 your daily salary, what is your daily salary? Be sure to debrief the concept of ‘relativity!’ Also be sure to point out to students that Guatemalans use a different currency (Quetzales!), not USD, and that you’re just using these units for practice. If you want, you could practice converting Quetzales to USD at the exchange rate of $1 USD = $7.5 quetzales.
After helping students “spend” their Guatemalan wages, encourage students to revisit the concept of community. How does the Guatemalan shopper’s experience compare to their own?
What does this show us about the complexities of communities? You might ask students, “Why is it important to understand how access to money affects families differently? What ways can we learn more about why these differences exist, and the roots of those differences? What kind of research can we do to learn more about why opportunity often differs between people, even though talent is universal?" And a reminder for us all: both where you are while reading this, and in Guatemala, we can't oversimplify or generalize and say that everyone in X place is Y. This could be a helpful reminder as you engage with the group, too.
This is one way to teach this story. You could also weave your own way, threading two or three other people the AI finds for you alongside.
Want to weave a full lesson around this story?
The weaver finds 3-4 real people whose stories thread together with this one.
Weave a lesson →Our Day-to-day
My day begins at 5 o’clock in the morning at my house in the town of San Andrés Iztapa in Guatemala. My home is not like other houses where the rooms are all connected under one rooftop. Mine is more like a compound: at the front is a big metal gate and a concrete path that runs down the middle. There are separate rooms on each side of the path, which I built from concrete blocks. The roofs are made from a crinkly metal, called corrugated tin. My wife and I painted the walls of each room with bright colors, like yellow and orange. The floors inside have colorful hand-painted tiles. The first thing I do in the morning is walk into my little office, which is in one of the rooms. I check my emails on my laptop and plan my work schedule for the afternoon. You may remember that I’m the director of the non-profit organization, Maya Pedal. After this bit of work, I’m ready to eat breakfast and visit with my family! I told you before that I have a wife, a teenage son and two younger daughters. It is important to me that we have time together in the morning so we can stay connected and know about each other’s lives. My youngest daughter likes to help my wife make our hearty breakfast of fresh corn tortillas, black beans and eggs. She even wears a little apron! To make the tortilla, my daughter first rolls up the dough, called masa, and pats it with her hands into flat circles.
These tortillas are small and delicious. Do you think we measure the ingredients in grams or in kilograms? For each tortilla, my daughter needs to add 10 units of ground corn flour. If we make one tortilla for each person in our family, how many units of corn flour do we need?
Next, my wife cooks the tortillas over a very simple stove. It’s just a fire of wood pieces burning beneath a hot metal plate. We all sit around the kitchen table to eat and chat before I head to work.
Now that I told you about my morning, tell me about yours!
What is your daily routine like?
How do you help around the house in the morning?
What are ways you spend time with your family?
What are some other things important to you?
My first stop for the day is the Maya Pedal workshop. I drive in my green car down the bumpy dirt roads to get there. We don’t have many paved roads out in rural Guatemala because they are expensive and our community can’t always afford to build them. So we’ve gotten really good at driving around big puddles or around rocks. The workshop is on the edge of town and surrounded by lots of trees and small farms. I slide my key into the big metal gates and pull the doors back. Inside you will see dozens of bicycles and even more bicycle parts. The workshop is filled with all kinds of tools and machines. Wrenches and pliers hang from a wooden board on the wall. Rows of bicycle frames without wheels are lined up waiting for our volunteers and mechanics to turn them into blenders, grinders, sharpeners -- whatever the customer wants to use it for. I have built hundreds of bike machines myself.
It’s part of my job to keep track of how many bike machines we make. Can you help me? By the end of the week, we had built 900 total bike machines. On Friday, we finished building 250 of those new bike machines. So how many bike machines did we build earlier in the week? How would you write this problem?
Now let’s try that with subtraction. Imagine that, next week, we only have 423 bike machines left at the workshop, down from our original 900. How many bike machines did we sell? How would you write this problem?
After I visit the workshop and make sure everything is going OK, I will drive around town to help fix any bike machines or talk with customers who have questions. Today I’m meeting with Marta. She is the customer who uses her bike machine to turn corn into feed for her hens and roosters. She is having trouble turning the pedals. She would push with her feet, but it was really hard to turn. Marta thinks the bike gear might need some grease. So I take a closer look. It turns out that the bike chain is on the wrong gear. I move it into the lower gear, which lets Marta pedal faster and with less effort. Next stop: Miguel’s house. He lives outside the main town and doesn’t have access to tap water, so he uses the bike machine to help pump water from the ground. He keeps the bike machine in a small shed made from clay bricks. To get there, we walk down a narrow dirt path through the forest and carry buckets to catch the clean water. Miguel has had his bike machine for 15 years! But now it’s not pumping as much water. Miguel doesn’t want to buy a new one. He wants to fix the one he has, even though it’s old. Here in Guatemala, we use our equipment until the very end. We don’t have enough money to buy a shiny new machine every couple of years, and we also don’t like to be wasteful. After looking at the bike machine's gears, I am able to fix the machine and get it pumping water again!
Have you ever had something break or rip, like a toy or your favorite T-shirt?
Were you able to fix it or did you have to buy a new one?
Why might it be a good idea to fix the things that we have, instead of buying brand new items?
How could it be better for the environment, or for your wallet?
Sometimes if we can’t fix things, we can find a new use for it, like a T-shirt that becomes a dust cloth.
Can you think of objects around your house or classroom that could be reused for other purposes?
Now that I’ve spent all day at the workshop and fixing bike machines, I am ready to go back home to my family. All five of us sit back down at the kitchen table for dinner. I am tired but happy to see the people I love at the end of the day. Tonight for dinner we’re having corn tortillas and beans -- two very common foods in Guatemala -- plus cheese and bright red tomatoes. My two older kids tell me what they learned today in school, and my youngest daughter tells me all the activities she did during the day. Once we clean up our dishes, my wife and I will discuss family matters, like which kid needs to go to the doctor or dentist, or our family budget.
Tonight my wife has a question about family expenses. She says our 3 children will all need flu shots, which cost $60 each. Will you help us do the math? How much will it cost us total? Did you have to get a flu shot or other types of vaccines? What was it like? Why do you think it’s important to go to the doctor’s office?
What to create a collaborative space? Ask you rstudents to help arrange their chairs in a circle
“Many of us have daily ‘routines’ – things we do in the mornings, during the day and in the evening. What is your routine like? What are the most important parts?” In groups or as a class, have students discuss their day-to-day and explore their differences and similarities.
Have them consider why they do certain things every morning or evening, and have some fun: What are things they would rather be doing instead of brushing their teeth or helping with chores? Pay attention to what they consider ‘most important’ and prod them to reflect on why those things are important.
Watch I am Mario then read “Mario’s Routine,” where we learn that Mario and his community are committed to squeezing as much value out of household objects as possible.
Little goes to waste in this rural Guatemalan town, whether by economic necessity or concern for the environment. To encourage children to consider their own consumer habits, you could do a project in which each student finds an item around the house or classroom (i.e. T-shirt, tangle of cables, plastic containers) and develops a way to repurpose this item. After this practical exercise, discuss with children, “What would have happened to those items if we didn’t save them? Where would they wind up? How much stuff do we routinely send to the landfill in a given day?” If you want to take these learnings even deeper, you can explore the videos and other resources on The Story of Stuff website.
Bring the discussion back to Mario, his business and his family. Experiment with grams and kilograms by mimicking corn masa with play dough or another gooey mixture.
If possible, students could weigh their ‘ingredients’ to help them understand grams and kilograms. Feel free to change the number tortillas that need to be cooked or the amount of corn flour needed to practice multiplying by 10s and multiples of 10. Consider counting the number of bicycles in Mario’s workshops to teach students addition and subtraction problems with missing values, encouraging them to recognize the problem can be written like this: ____ + 250 = 900 and 900 - ___ +423. You can change the numbers around to make the problem less or more challenging. To make this practice more engaging, you could split the students into pairs or small groups and have them “role play” Mario and two of his volunteers. The role play could include such things as: Mario playing the role of boss and choosing 3-digit numbers to represent the amount of bikes he hopes to build by the end of each week and how many are currently built. The two volunteers must figure out how many more bikes need to be built. It could be made more complicated by letting the “Mario” role player decide how many bikes he/she wants built at the end of the month, then ask the “volunteers” role players to determine how many bikes must be built each week to reach their goal. Mario is interested in tracking how many bikes they build a week. As a class, you could draw a bar graph at the front of the room. Then each team adds their number to the graph. Helping Mario and his wife calculate their flu shot budget provides an opportunity to practice multiplying by multiples of 10. This could also be practiced in a role play scenario of pairs; one student is Mario and the other is Mario’s wife. Mario’s wife is struggling to understand how much the flu shot will cost. “Mario” comes up with as many ways as possible to write the equation and explain it to “his wife.”
After applying math to Mario’s life, ask students how they might apply the same principles in their own day-to-day experience. For instance, “When might it be useful to know how to add or subtract big numbers? How did it help Mario’s business and his family budget?”
This is one way to teach this story. You could also weave your own way, threading two or three other people the AI finds for you alongside.
Want to weave a full lesson around this story?
The weaver finds 3-4 real people whose stories thread together with this one.
Weave a lesson →Creative Design
I bet you’ve used some creative thinking to problem solve in your classroom or at your home. Can you draw a picture or write a short story about a time that creative thinking helped you? Or maybe your class has a problem needing solved right now and you could all brainstorm some creative solutions together!
Do you think it is important to support your community? Why or why not? Can you brainstorm a list of benefits to living in a community? Now let’s think outside our community. Why might it be important to support people in other communities around the world?
Have you ever come up with a creative new way to use an everyday product? Tell me about your own ideas! Who would your invention benefit? Why is it important in your community? Something I’ve learned is that it is important for Maya Pedal to be responding to a need: we need less expensive, reliable sources of power and so we came up with a solution! What is a need you see? Can you brainstorm a list of needs with your classmates? Then work backward to come up with a business idea that offers a solution!
Marta used to just grind her corn by hand, which was really hard work! It took her about 4 minutes to grind one pound of corn. Using my bici-maquina, she can grind 5 pounds of corn in 6 minutes. To compare the two machines, Marta wants to write these as fractions. But she can't because they don't share a common denominator. Help Marta find the common denominator so she can see how much faster the bike-machine is than the hand grinder!
Now Marta wants to know how many pounds of corn she made in a week with her bike-machine. This will require adding mixed numbers with common denominators. On Monday, Marta ground 6 ¼ pounds. On Tuesday, she ground 5 ¼ pounds. On Wednesday, she ground 7 pounds of corn, and on Thursday she ground 7 ½ pounds. How many pounds did she grind in four days?
Has anyone ever told you they didn't like one of your ideas? Did you turn that into a positive conversation? Has an idea of yours ever failed? We tend to be afraid of failure, like answering a question wrong, or doing something incorrectly that our mom asked us to do. But I think failure can actually be a good thing, too. What are some reasons failure can sometimes be a good thing? What is something you’ve learned from a time that things went wrong?
Want to create a focused space? Ask students to close their eyes and visualize themselves riding a bike.
“Where do you think all the stuff we use comes from? What goes into making it, and how does it get onto our plate or into our closet?” Guide students into a group discussion to help them start thinking about the effects of their consumption far beyond their personal lives.
Encourage them to think about the different components of each “stuff” thing you discuss to explore how far-reaching our products and impact can be. You could also tie this lesson in with exploring, The Story of Stuff.
“We often use tools or machines for just one purpose, but with creativity, we can find new uses. What are some objects in your classroom or at home that you could use in an unexpected way?" Ask students to see everyday objects in a new light.
A milk carton can become a bird feeder. Banana peels can become fertilizer. A bottle of water built into the wall can become a light bulb. Begin with an open discussion, asking students to offer up their own ideas. Brainstorm this a bit, then watch I am Mario and read “Mario Repurposes Bikes.” Revisit the question and see if they gained new inspiration. Consider breaking students into groups and assigning them one object, then encouraging them to dream up new uses for that particular item. Center on Mario’s bike-machines described in the Learning Journey. Discuss with your group, “Do you have any other ideas for creative uses of every-day items? How are the people in Mario's community resourceful? What do you think of their approach to businesses? What are some lessons we can take from Mario's village in Guatemala?"
Now that your students have imagined sustainable designs, let's revisit how Marta uses her bici-maquina to grind corn.
Start by asking your students, “What are some ideas you have for things that may help Mario explain to new customers why the bici-maquina is so useful?” After sharing some ideas, tell them you’re going to do some calculations that Mario could use when communicating with potential customers. You could split the class into two groups; half the class could work on creating a multiplication table that illustrates how many buckets of corn Marta can grind in a week by hand and by using the bici-maquina. The other half of the class could work on calculating how long it would take to grind the neighbor’s 12 buckets of corn by hand and by the bici-maquina, also showing in fraction form how much would be completed in one day. Then have each group explain to the other the tools and concepts they used to solve their problem. Lead a debrief discussion on how each group’s tools could help the other group’s problem, exploring the relationship between multiplication and division. Variations could be created by changing the numbers and by suggesting the neighbor uses cans smaller than buckets, creating an opportunity to compare fractions of different wholes.
After helping Marta with math, take a step back and ask students how they might use fractions in their own lives. You could provide examples from your life as well.
Discuss with the group, “Why is it helpful to know fractions? What are some areas in your own life where knowing these skills might come in handy one day?"
This is one way to teach this story. You could also weave your own way, threading two or three other people the AI finds for you alongside.
Want to weave a full lesson around this story?
The weaver finds 3-4 real people whose stories thread together with this one.
Weave a lesson →Not hers. Not yours. People are always more than the chapters anyone could share. Hold what is here gently. Approach with curiosity, before judgment.
If a moment stayed, follow it. If a question rose up, hold it. The quiet teaching is still teaching.
Three or four real stories woven into one lesson, your topic, your time. Mario is one. The weaver finds the others, threads the math, the literacy, the values, the reflection.
Open the weaver →