Tuesday, March 10, 2009

family math night

Tonight was my school's annual family math night. It was so much fun. I haven't been able to go the past 3 years, but I helped out tonight. We had about 75 or 80 families attend. I had half of my class there, which I thought was great. We had estimation jars where families could guess how many items were in the jar. Then there were about 15 different math games. Each teacher ran one game and families moved around and played them. Then each family left with one copy of each game so they can play them again at home. There were easier games for the younger kids and harder ones for the bigger kids...and many of them could be modified for different ages. Each child also got a ticket and there was a drawing for a bunch of different prizes (mainly board games that also reinforce math skills.)

My game was the array game. It is a fun game to reinforce multiplication. Basically, you roll two dice which becomes your multiplication equation. Then on the game board, you draw an array to represent that number (4 boxes across and 5 boxes down... then draw a rectangle around it 4 x 5 = 20). You write the equation and total in the middle. Lots of fun. For little kids, we had them add instead and circle the total. For really little kids, we had them count the numbers on the dice adn then circle that many circles on the gameboard.

There was a bingo game with shapes, a game to learn more about polygons, a sock sorting game, a money game, a subtraction target game and several more.

What a fun (and hopefully beneficial for our students!) night!

1 comment:

  1. we don't have that, but it sounds like fun!! I wish I was good at math! Counting to 20 every day is about my forte!

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