Odds and Ends

So officially we’re on winter break and the club will not meet up again until January. It’s also reregistration time. This had led me to imagine a few scenarios. Bear in mind I’m drawing from a pool of about 250 elementary school kids in fourth and fifth grade.

1. All the kids who are interested already are coming.

2. I lose a few kids due to scheduling and/or not interesting them enough

3. I have wonderful word of mouth and lots more kids try to register forcing me to cap the enrollment.

4. A few more kids who didn’t sign up the first time show up because we’re now starting in the official manner rather than a month late.

It turns out the answer appears to be #4. Tentatively we’re at 18 kids for the next quarter which is at about my capacity to handle. Last time a few kids appeared each week so I’ll see if that happens again or not. I don’t really like saying no so I’m hoping that it isn’t the case.

AMC 8 When I talked with previous coach, she gave me a list of all the contests the club went to last year. AMC 8 was not on the list and I assumed that was because it was not open to kids below sixth grade or like Math Counts had restricted times one could participate. . It turns out that is not the case. It occurred last month so we’re not going to participate this year. However, all the questions were posted online at:

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Wiki/index.php/2014_AMC_8

So I’m excited to use them as take home exercises over the next month or two and double check them as a group.  Tentatively I think I’ll give out 5 questions a week since most kids don’t have enough time or interest to do a lot of work in between meetings. Stay tuned: It will be very interesting to see how everyone does on them.