I’m always looking for ways to show students (and parents!) that math is everywhere. That was one of my goals when I created a fun station for a recent Family Math Night event: Musical Math Notes. The Station My idea was to have students “compose” their own music by placing notes on a staff* and then playing their music on real keyboards. It was a huge hit at our event, and, as is always the case when you do anything new,…
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…
Activities are planned. Materials gathered. Facilitators signed up. Now it’s time to think about some easy ways to create a fun and welcoming Family Math Night environment. I call this “accessorizing” your event. Here are four simple ideas: 1. “Passport” Stickers and Prizes Kids love collecting stickers. And they love getting prizes, too! So as they enter your event, hand them a “passport” that lists each of the stations. They collect stickers by completing an activity at a station. Once…
There’s been a big push to get students looking at and analyzing data. So I’m excited to share with you one of my latest What Do You Notice? posters…a poster that gives students (and their families) an opportunity to think about and share their thoughts about the math they see. For this poster, I created a simple pie graph as a fun way to show students how information can be visually organized. That said, as you’ll see in the description below, there’s a lot…
Here’s a super fun – and simple – activity you can do at your next Family Math Night. A Selfie Station. We included one at a recent event and it was a HUGE hit! The photo to the left shows the backdrop we used. Two of my staff had a lot of fun creating it but it doesn’t need to be this detailed. A title and a few fun math symbols would work great. You could even have upper elementary students or the Student…