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Category: Grades 3-5

A Fun Parent Conference Giveaway

A Fun Parent Conference Giveaway

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In my August newsletter I mentioned that I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Karen Mapp, renowned for her work on family engagement, speak at this year’s National ESEA Conference. Then over the summer I read her co-authored book Everyone Wins! The Evidence for Family-School Partnerships & Implications for Practice. In her presentation and throughout the book, Dr. Mapp underscored the importance of moving from informing parents and caregivers about their children’s learning to including families as active participants. It begins with building relationships through on-going conversations…

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ABCs and 123s – A Family Math Night Activity

ABCs and 123s – A Family Math Night Activity

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Not every game made the cut. That’s where this activity comes in. As we were deciding which games to use in our Building Number Sense Power Pack series, we had to make some hard choices: which games stayed and which games were put back in the folder for another time.  Since this particular activity was really just that – an activity – we decided it didn’t fit in with our games theme. So in the folder it went. Until recently. I was organizing my folders and re-discovered it. And because…

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Play-N-Take 3 Math Games

Play-N-Take 3 Math Games

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I’m very excited to share with you our latest Family Math Night and parent engagement product – Play-N-Take 3. In the video below I describe these super fun and engaging math games. But first, I want to share with you two recent reports that underscore in a very big way the importance of early math skills. The first is from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and synthesizes recent research from the Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Policy Center. This line from the article sums…

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Insect Symmetry – A Family Math Night Activity

Insect Symmetry – A Family Math Night Activity

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Math and art. It’s always a huge hit at our Family Math Night events. Since we were using our Gellin’ with Geometry kit and the event was in the spring, I decided to tie geometry and spring together and came up with a springtime symmetry activity. Enter our insect friends. The type of symmetry I focused on was bilateral symmetry. It’s the same as mirror or reflection symmetry except that when it comes to biological creatures – like our insect friends – biologists call…

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Fibonacci Flower Garden Collaborative Project

Fibonacci Flower Garden Collaborative Project

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I’m always looking for ways to combine math and art into a fun activity. I’m also always looking for ways to show students that we’re surrounded by math in ways we aren’t necessarily aware of. That brings me to a recent Family Math Night Collaborative Project. In this project I used the Fibonacci numbers to have participants create a Fibonacci Flower Garden. Fibonacci numbers are a sequence of numbers that are generated by adding the previous two numbers starting with 0 and…

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