Upping Our Math Game: Outreach Exhibits and so much more!

       This session was all about how to make math more fun for kids (and staff) and how to make it less daunting. The overarching idea from all the presenters was that math can be found in every day activities and it doesn't need to be like a "hit you over the head with the math lesson" type of thing. It could be something as simple as making patterns with stampers or having the kids estimate and measure the amount of objects that can fit into different size containers. 
  
         Christina did a great job giving an overview of this session, so I'll just talk about the highlight for me. I really enjoyed San Antonio's DOseum Presentation about their Mathletics Summer program. It is run similar to our summer reading program, where the kids earn a prize for the math activities that they complete over the summer. They give them these little booklets that have challenges and activities for them to complete (one for grades K-2 and one for 3-5), and then their parents bring them in to the museum to get their medals. Once they earn all 5 medals they get to participate in the completion party. They mentioned how there are a lot of programs around that support reading in the summer, but not really any that support math skills, which actually suffer more in the summer slide than reading does. I really thought this was an awesome idea, to try to make math fun for the kids and get them excited about it and seeing it in their every day lives. I have extra copies of the booklets if anyone wants to see them :) 
   

       This was a picture of a play area that had different shapes for the kids to crawl into it. They talked about having prompts available for each area of the museum that brings in math concepts (counting items, noticing patterns, categorizing, noticing the differences in height or length of objects, etc.) 

      They gave us a great list of books to use in math story read alouds. A whole math program could be built around the concepts and art in the story. 

      

     This was a fun session that allowed us to interact and get a little more comfortable with math programming. 

-Yolanda 

Hello!

Megan here! Took me a while to finally get the slide show of some of the pics we took, but feel free to browse through what happened behind the scenes of our session!

You'll see some silly pics of Yolanda and I trying out one of the balance activtivities using items found in the room. You would think it would be an easy exercise to balance a small stack of paper and a stuffed animals, but boy- it was hard! Try balancing with the tree pose! Not easy stuff! 

The rest of the slides include some of the activities mentioned from Christina's entry from yesterday. Feel free to use as resources for your programs!

Lastly, the last set of pictures talks about the Counting Book activity. This is a great self guiding activity for early learners who are just learning how to grasp the concept of numbers and space. Definitely a fun concept to do for our storytimes too!

Click the link to view slideshow!

-Megan