Jones Elementary welcomes families at Math Night

Jones Elementary welcomes families at Math Night

(ROCKWALL, TX — October 30, 2017) This year, Jones Elementary School incorporated a cowboy theme for its Family Math Night. The purpose of Family Math Night is to provide engaging math activities to students and their families, ones which they can enjoy together that night as well as at home with common materials—cards, dice, beans, etc.

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 of the Jones students’ favorite games was “Rodeo Round-up” where players split a card deck into two equal piles and each player turns over a card at the same time.  The first person to say the correct sum of the two cards gets to take both cards.  The partner who eventually collects all the cards wins.  Older students played the same game using multiplication of whole numbers and/or integers for a higher challenge.

Another favorite was “Snake in My Boot!”  Players roll two dice, find the sum or product, depending on their level, and place this number in the “S” column of their recording sheet.  They can continue to roll, adding each new sum to their current total.  If they roll a one on either dice, however, they lose all their points from that round and put a zero at the bottom of that column.  There are five rounds, one column for each letter in the word “snake.”  If they roll two ones, called “snake eyes,” they lose all of their points in each column they have played so far.  The winner is the person with the most points at the end of the five rounds.

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.

Submitted press release.

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