10/1 Year 5!

5 minute read

This is my fifth year doing a math club and its still just as thrilling to start again as it was the first time. (Although a lot less nerve wracking now that I know what to expect.) This year since I’m more familiar with the school I was able to have both the official Instagram account and morning announcements on the PA mention signing up. Those were in addition to the usual page on school website, PTSA newsletter and Facebook posts. In the midst of the bootstrapping process, it occurred to me that I wished I had posters. I couldn’t do anything about it this time but my plan for the future is to always have the kids make signs close to the last day for the session or year that I can use the next time for recruiting. What’s nice is I can hopefully let the club officers take charge of this.

Name tents.

After all was said and done, the recruiting season was a grand success. I have my target number of students 15 again. Plus, the gender balance is nearly perfect this year. I’m at 8 girls and 7 boys. The mix is mostly a split of 6th and 7th graders as expected with two 8th graders. More challengingly, the kids span classes from Math7 to Geometry. I expect planning activities that work for everyone and making comfortable work groups is going to be my main focus this year.

One other issue that came up is an unregistered boy showed up that I didn’t fully realize was not on my list until the end. So I have to track him down before next time. For a variety of reasons including safety I always need to have parent’s permission and contact numbers at a minimum. Note: my memory is good but its better to print out a roster and bring it on the first day for easy access.

My main goal for the first session is to set the tone. This has two main prongs. First, I want to establish the culture and norms of the group. Secondly, I want enough time to do something engaging and representative of the type of activities we’ll do in the future weeks.

So to start off, I had the kids make the name tents pictured above. Since I knew about half of the kids from prior years learning the new names is not too difficult. The back of each of these actually has sections for feedback comments and questions and for me to write back. I reminded everyone a few time but a lot of them were left blank. I think I still want to use this a little bit next week so I’ll be more careful about blocking out some time for it at the end.

That didn’t really worry me that much since I had a very productive club norms chat for the first half.

Talking Points:

Intros: ”What’s your name, math class and why did you join?”
Respect the room.
Respect each other.
Listening to me and peers.
Importance of questions
What to do if you’re stuck
What is Math?
What does it mean to be good at math?

These fall into 2 categories. Non-negotiable norms like behaving as guests in the room I just enumerated myself.

For most of the rest of the topics I either went around the room and had all the kids give an opinion or for the more complex topics like “What is Math” we ended up in a free form discussion with multiple people volunteering ideas. Usually I tend to stress the idea of persistence on this day which we did talk about. But this year my main theme is instead going to be focused on questions. Even today I was particularly focused on emphasizing everyone should come up with questions. I’m trying to say “I would like two clarifying questions from the group” rather than “Are there any questions” and consciously provide lots of opportunities for them to occur.

The conversation took about half the time so for the back half I decided to to start with Map Wars like last year since it was so much fun the first time.

This game is a riff on the map coloring problem. First everyone broke into groups of 3 or 4 kids and each one selected a different color erasable marker. Then I had them take turns drawing dots on the small whiteboards and afterwards connecting the dots to create a map.

Once the setup phase is done, everyone takes turns coloring in a section of the map. There are only 3 rules:

No section can border another section of the same color.
The game ends when no one can find another section to color in.
The student with most sections at the end wins.

On a normal day I would probably end with a group discussion about strategy and observed patterns but for this day since time was very short I let everyone just free play.

The kids are all using small portable whiteboards as you can see above. This is a new feature for this year. The room I’m borrowing has much more limited whiteboard space so I’m not going to be able to do group white boarding exercises as easily. I’m going to experiment over the next few weeks with these ones to see how well they work. One idea I already have is to have the kids stand and use the board while looking at the main one in the room.

Finally as groups finished up the Map War games I brought them over to the front of the room for a couple of teaser problems. I selected two from the most recent MathsJam session I hosted since I had found them so interesting myself. For the most part the kids spent the last 10 minutes working on them in small clusters around the whiteboard.