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Category: Activities

Promoting Your Family Math Night Event

Promoting Your Family Math Night Event

Dinner + Math We all know that parents are busy people. Any opportunity to make their lives easier and, well, they’re usually in. So let’s take dinner off their plate (!) and feed them. A spaghetti feed works well. But if you want to make it easy, bring in pizza or, even better, have a local restaurant donate the food. You can pass out their restaurant coupons at the Family Math Night sending customers in their direction. It’s a win/win! If you do decide to offer…

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Empower Students to Lead – Students as Station Facilitators

Empower Students to Lead – Students as Station Facilitators

Students make great Family Math Night Station Facilitators. As much as I can, I use students in grades 5 and up to run my stations. Here’s why: In my September newsletter I shared an activity that I did at a recent event – ABCs and 123s. I absolutely loved watching how engaged the families were. But my favorite part of this activity was Paisley, my fifth grade station facilitator. I happened to capture her on video as she helped two students do the…

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A Fun Parent Conference Giveaway

A Fun Parent Conference Giveaway

In my August newsletter I mentioned that I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Karen Mapp, renowned for her work on family engagement, speak at this year’s National ESEA Conference. Then over the summer I read her co-authored book Everyone Wins! The Evidence for Family-School Partnerships & Implications for Practice. In her presentation and throughout the book, Dr. Mapp underscored the importance of moving from informing parents and caregivers about their children’s learning to including families as active participants. It begins with building relationships through on-going conversations…

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ABCs and 123s – A Family Math Night Activity

ABCs and 123s – A Family Math Night Activity

Not every game made the cut. That’s where this activity comes in. As we were deciding which games to use in our Building Number Sense Power Pack series, we had to make some hard choices: which games stayed and which games were put back in the folder for another time.  Since this particular activity was really just that – an activity – we decided it didn’t fit in with our games theme. So in the folder it went. Until recently. I was organizing my folders and re-discovered it. And because…

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Play-N-Take 3 Math Games

Play-N-Take 3 Math Games

I’m very excited to share with you our latest Family Math Night and parent engagement product – Play-N-Take 3. In the video below I describe these super fun and engaging math games. But first, I want to share with you two recent reports that underscore in a very big way the importance of early math skills. The first is from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and synthesizes recent research from the Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Policy Center. This line from the article sums…

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