Jones Elementary recently hosted Family Math Night. The purpose of Family Math Night is to provide engaging math activities to students and their families. This year, Jones incorporated a cowboy theme.
Families started the evening by estimating the weight and cost of a bag of groceries, which was awarded the following day to the student who was closest in their estimation.
One popular game was Rodeo Round-up where players split a card deck into 2 equal piles and each player turns over a card at the same time. The first person to say the correct sum of the 2 cards gets to take both cards. Older students played the same game using multiplication of whole numbers and/or integers for a higher challenge.
One of the tastiest activities was Sweet Shapes Trail where students build 2-D, even 3-D, shapes with gumdrops and toothpicks. Once built, students were able to transfer their 2-D shapes onto a geoboard with rubber bands and manipulate them into similar figures.
The night included games to deepen place value understanding, games to reinforce the strategies of counting on, doubling, making tens, decomposing, compensating and relating these to balanced equations, and games to increase spatial knowledge with geometric shape activities, including area and perimeter.
All games also were designed to help increase students’ fluency.
