Tamarack gears up for virtual family math night
Mar. 6—Tamarack Elementary School Math Interventionist Amanda Hundley wants families to connect over math while also teaching students that the subject can be fun.
She and other educators at the school developed a virtual family math night that will take place from 4 to 6 p.m. March 16. Registered families will receive a "math fun bundle" prior to the event that includes materials for the games to be played during the event, popcorn and books.
Participating families also will be eligible for door prizes that include pizza to be enjoyed the same night of the event.
"Some of our staff will go out to deliver that pizza during the time that we are doing our math night," she said.
Typically the school would engage families during parent-teacher nights, but with the COVID-19 pandemic, events like that are not permitted.
"We can't do that now so we were looking for a way to involve parents virtually so that we could give them some strategies to use with their students at home," Hundley said. "Math can be fun, and this just gives them that extra support at home to use with their student."
The evening will begin with a presentation about the importance of a strong foundation in math, and the role family members and educators play in ensuring a student's success in the subject. Those who participate will then rotate to four "breakout rooms" via Google Classroom, at which time they will learn about grade-appropriate math activities and games to play at home.
Each of the break-out rooms will have a different math concept as the central focus, including geometry, operations and algebraic thinking, numbers, and measurement and data.
One of the break-out rooms includes, according to Hundley, Race to 100, which is for students in kindergarten through first grade. This activity uses place-value blocks to support students' thinking and reasoning skills in a base-10 number system using concrete tools. Each player will roll the dice to determine a number, and then use base-10 blocks to build the number. The other players take turns and keep building on the numbers by previous players. Students will work with the terms "regrouping" and "trading" as they are building numbers by regrouping once they have 10 1s or 10 10s. The first player to reach 100 wins the game.
Broken Calculator is another game for those in second and third grades. This activity is designed to engage students in practicing place value and performing operations by thinking critically about different operations and number combinations. In this game, players try to reach a goal number while pretending that certain keys on the calculator don't work.
Dinner Table is another activity that is for fourth- and fifth-graders. This activity is designed to build fluency in comparing and performing operations with decimals in a real-world context. Students will work with their families to determine a budget for a meal. The family will then look at a menu and order their meal. Next, they will calculate the total cost of it and figure out how much money they have left over — or determine how much over their budget they spent.
This event is made possible through the school's Kentucky Department of Education Math Achievement Fund grant.
The Math Achievement Fund grant "provides schools with funds for teacher training and implementation of intervention services that address the needs of students in the primary program who are struggling with meeting grade level or benchmark expectations for mathematics," according to KDE.
Students register for the virtual night through a Google form that is available on the Tamarack Facebook page. Emails have also been sent to families, and each teacher has posted the link to the Google form on their Google Classroom.
Bobbie Hayse, bhayse@messenger-inquirer.com, 270-691-7315
Bobbie Hayse, bhayse@messenger-inquirer.com, 270-691-7315
