Family math night was overall a huge success from what I heard in class, and from the faces and talk of the parents. With our catapult math, I loved the game because, it was fun, and math was involved but students were excited to figure out the math in order to discover their score and how well they did with the catapult.
Towards the end of the night, one boy came up to the play the game, and kept getting past the hundred or landing on the hundred which was very hard to do and he was only one of 2 that reached the hundred. He was so excited and you could tell that he felt very accomplished, he was so excited to do the math to find out what his total score was. The boy kept coming back, and his father then asked if he could have one of our catapults for him to play this game at home, because it is one that can easily be replicated. Knowing that someone loved this game so much that they wanted to continue is what makes me to have this apart of classroom in the future.
Overall when kids came through to add the totals there were many methods in which some students went about. The first option was to split the addition vertically as so: 14
+ 13
_____
To solve this problem students would add 4 and 3 together to get 7, they would then bring that down then add the two 1's together and receive 27 as the total.
Another step that students would take would be to divide it up horizontally step by step:
20 The student would first add 20 and 30 together then take that 50 plus 30 to receive 80.
+ 30
+ 30
_____
I think if we were to play the game again Andrea and I would have chosen a play with a little more space away from the bookshelf's because at time the teddy bears would go underneath, and if there was a rush the area where we were in was very cluttered. Lastly we would have had to catapults set up on where Andrea ran one, and one where I did to reduce the line size.
Overall, I really loved Family Math Night, and it reminded me why I want to become a teacher in the first place.
