Students, Teachers, and Parents Celebrate Math!

“It’s over here – beside the Leaping Leopards!” shouted a student as he pulled his parents toward the project he had helped create for Boundary Street Elementary School’s second annual Math Fair. His was only one of 39 math investigations undertaken in preparation for the Jan 25 Math Fair. Creative titles such as Some Half- Some Half Not (symmetry) attracted visitors as they moved from project to project. Student representatives stood by each project showboard in order to answer any questions visitors might have.  There was a project from each homeroom and from the special area teachers, including music, art, guidance, media center, Student Services, Gifted and Talented, and the 5th grade Math Olympiad Team.

Boundary Street’s Math Fair grew from analysis of our data from the Data Analysis and Probability strand of MAP testing. We determined that students needed more practical application in this area, and needed to make better connections between curriculum standards and real life. Each teacher worked with her students to choose a question to which they did not know the answer AND one that they would need to use math to answer. Then they wrote their hypothesis, sequenced the procedures to find the answer, and listed materials needed to repeat the investigation. Results were displayed using a table or graph. Then students drew a conclusion based on their hypothesis and results.

If you would like a copy of our guidelines we developed to create these projects, email me at dsmith@newberry.k12.sc.us.

Students visited the Fair during the school day, and parents and the community visited that evening from 6:30 to 7:30 pm. The next day, students wrote in their journals about what they learned at the Fair. Adam, a four-year old Montessori student, wrote about what he learned from his class’s project on symmetry:
sumeticl letrs have a line of simute. Simutre means When you draw a Line in the mitl of the Letr it is the sam on both sides. NONsumtricl Letrs are not the same on both sides. Our progict was Fun!

Dale Smith
Mathematics Coach
Boundary Street Elementary
Newberry