Healey Students Report on their Family Math Night

Compiled and submitted by Nathaniel, Jackson, Sophia, Laila, Karlos, Marcela, Nicholas, Kyara, Loden, Shane, Madison, Grace, Sam and Isabel from Room # 106.

As second grade students many of us have gone to Healey School Family Math Night for three years and played a lot of different games. Since 14 out of 21 children in our class went, 2/3 of our class was there! This was the Eighth Annual Family Math Night for Kindergarten through Grade Two. Math Night was on Tuesday, June 2nd this year. It was the best night for a lot of us like Marcela and full of fun! “Family Night rocked!”

After we got our passports, some of us went to Estimation Station where we estimated different containers of healthy food and explained our thinking. Family Math Night had so many games that none of us played them all. We spent time finding our friends so we could play games together. We played with partners like Karlos and Nathaniel, alone and with more than two! We learned new games. Laila enjoyed the pizza and water and had a lot of fun with family and friends.

Table activities were set up in the cafeteria. In Watch Out for the Smile we kept adding numbers from the dice until we rolled a smile. Then we took away the numbers from that turn. In Nim, we had 15 stirrers. Each person could take 1,2 or 3 away but no one wanted to have the last stirrer! Grace played three times. We made some pretty quilt squares to make a paper quilt. We learned that we could make some of the games ourselves with egg cartons like Scramble Shake and Mancala. Loden made and played Mancala on a camping trip this way! In Origami, Kyara's mother showed her how to make a puppy. Some other games were Empty the Bowl, Baseball Go, Roll to Cover, Start and Jump, How Many Am I Hiding, Dot to Dot, Hexagon Moves and Tangrams. The games were fun, but tiring for Sam!

In the gym, seventh and eighth graders helped Mrs. C.B. set up and help with actively pursuing math activities. Nicholas observed that the most people were probably at bowling. Other popular activities were Measure Me, Bean Bag Math and Great Musical Sums (like Musical Chairs except no one was out and when the music stopped, we rolled dice and put the number on a chart).

We went in Ms. Murdock's room to play board games, to use calculators and to build Tall Towers. One time the tower was so big it was taller than Jackson standing on a chair! Here, Isabel taught others how to play yet another version of Mancala.

Madison noted that Family Math Night was a success. We even had high school teenagers helping out including Mr. Michel's daughter and Laila's sister. Shane was very happy to go to Math Night this year even though he will be too old next year. He wants to volunteer when he is older. Sophia sadly reported that this was her first and last time going to Family Math Night because she was going on to Third Grade. As summed up by Karlos, “Family Math Night was a blast!”