Training Family Math Night Student 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.
– It’s a great leadership opportunity.
– It shows them respect when you trust them with the responsibility of being in charge of their station.
– They develop inter-personal skills working with both their peers and adults.
– Their own learning and understanding is underscored when they show others how to do a task.
About a week before the event I hold a meeting with all my student station facilitators. The meeting runs between one hour and 1 1/2 hours depending on whether they’ve watched the video of their station in advance (see Flipped Classroom below).
In advance, I’ve organized all the materials needed for each station into bags. The photo below reflects the stations for our Gellin’ with Geometry Family Math Night. After thanking students for their very important role and going over some logistics (time to show up for the event, cleaning up their station, what to wear, etc.) I describe each station then organize students into those stations according to their interests. I hand out the bags and students practice the activities. As they are doing that, I rotate. If I can, I have one other adult with me so that checking in with student understanding of their station is easier.
Lately, I’ve been adding a What Do You Notice? poster to each of my events. The student(s)in charge of the Estimation Table will be handling the poster comments, as well. During the training they are busy answering the question.
It’s actually a pretty easy training. If I feel some students need additional practice with some of the advanced activities, I send them home with the materials so they can practice.
On event night, I give each student a Family Math Night visor to wear so they are easily recognized by the participants as the Station Facilitators. If you don’t have the visors, they can wear their school t-shirt or, at the very least, all wear the same color shirt. When the doors open and the participants flood in, they shine. It’s really their Family Math Night event. They do a fabulous job.
The Flipped Classroom and Training Students
I used the flipped classroom model yesterday when I trained a group of 16 fifth graders to be station facilitators at my next Math Medley Family Math Night event. It went amazingly well! Here’s what I did.
In advance of working with the students, I sent home the link to the Math Medley station videos. In the videos I describe all of the activities at each one of the stations and share tips on running the station. So by the end of the videos, the students should have a pretty good idea of what to expect.
When I arrived for the training, I asked them if the videos were helpful and if they had any questions. With the exception of one station that was a little confusing to them because they didn’t have access to the actual materials, they thought that by watching the videos they had a pretty good handle on what to do. It was the easiest training I’d ever done. I was able to quickly review the stations, have them try out a few of the activities, and, voila, we were done! The whole thing took less than 45 minutes…and a lot of that was working on one of the ‘Challenge’ problems from the Polygons Station which they were determined to figure out!
All in all, the flipped classroom model really worked in this case. Having the videos is a huge help to the person organizing the Family Math Night event. Simply give the station facilitator the link to their station and training is done! If fifth graders can do it, anyone can!
2 thoughts on “Training Family Math Night Student Station Facilitators”
Are any of the family night kits in Spanish? Can the Spanish take home games be used for a family math for Spanish speaking families.
Hi Kay,
Yes – our Play-N-Take, Play-N-Take 2 and Make-N-Take are all available in Spanish and would make a great Family Math Night for your Spanish speaking families!
Here’s the link: https://familymathnight.com/kits/takehomekits.php