Woodland Elementary School third-grader Clover Beatty sat at a table playing an area and perimeter game with her parents, April and Mike Beatty, on Nov. 13 at Woodland Elementary School’s Family Math Night.
Clover, 8, is a math whiz, Mike Beatty said. She’s in an advanced math class, already learning multiplication, division and place value, mom April Beatty said. They attended Family Math Night to encourage her interest and have fun, she said.
More than 175 families of first-, second- and third-grade students participated in a variety of math games that covered skills ranging from addition, subtraction, multiplication, problem solving, geometry and logic. Many of the games were played with a deck of cards or a set of dice.
Laura Tieman, third-grade math specialist, organized Family Math Night along with the school’s other math specialists, Anne Tussing and Meagan Dillon, to give parents the tools they need to reinforce lessons at home.
“Years ago, the school had family math nights, and we’ve brought it back,” Tieman said. “We hope it will become an annual event. Parents are asking for ways to help at home, and math games are a fun way to practice.”
Parents could take home copies of the games they played that night, she said.
April Beatty said that if Clover has trouble understanding a concept while she’s doing her homework, she and her husband will rephrase the question.
“Sometimes if she’s not understanding the directions, we refocus on what we’re studying right now,” she said.
“I have a whole shelf of math books at home,” April Beatty said about how she refreshes her math memory.
Tieman said the new Common Core curriculum dictated by the state has raised the bar for math at the elementary age.
“It’s more focused on how to apply math,” Tieman said, giving a recent example of a unit on area and perimeter that required students to measure rooms at home.
“We’re so pleased with the turnout,” she said. “It exceeded our expectations and we’re proud we have such supportive parents. We’re helping families teach their kids math concepts by playing games so they don’t realize they’re learning. Math should be fun.”
Mike Beatty said he and his wife encourage Clover when tackling math problems.
“Math is important in our whole culture, and there’s a stereotype that girls aren’t good at math,” Mike Beatty said. “I don’t believe that [stereotype] and want to encourage her in the future.”
Janet Colin brought her daughters, Gabriela,10, Adriana, 8, and Alexandria, 5, all Woodland students, to the family math night.
“It’s a great opportunity for me as a working mom. It’s important for me to learn what they’re learning so we can learn and play at home,” Colin said.
Colin said when she’s not sure how to do a problem, she usually Googles it.
“It’s harder because you have the teacher teaching it in a certain way, and I may have learned it differently. I’m not a teacher and I’m learning that [my kids] understand things differently than I do,” she said.
“Math is the basis for everything,” she said. “Science and technology are taking over.”
Gabriela, 10, said, “I like math because there are problems that are easy to do.”
At Antioch Community High School, 1133 Main St., high schoolers designed math games for fourth- through sixth-graders from Antioch Upper Grade School to play at a math fair Nov. 21.
Jill Farrell, math department chair at Antioch Community High School, said math fairs are “a good way for kids to see that math isn’t always dry and it’s good for parents to see what their kids are learning.”
Games at the math fair included Bozo Buckets where students had to answer a math question per bucket toss and basketball games, Farrell said. “It’s like incorporating math into Chuck E. Cheese,” she said. “It’s a different way of thinking about math.”