I ❤️ Math Day in the Lower School

I ❤️ Math Day is an important annual celebration at Mustard Seed School. The goals for students on I ❤️ Math Day include:

• Encouraging thinking about math and numbers as a part of everyday life
• Fostering a positive attitude and excitement about math by having fun together with math
• Exploring different areas of math (measuring, counting and operations, sorting, building, comparisons, patterns, shapes, etc.)
• Highlighting interdisciplinary connections with math and numbers

In that way, teachers designed ways for students to exercise their math skills and practices in fun and creative ways.

Encouraging thinking about math and numbers as a part of everyday life.

Brynn Wallner (’04) was our alumni guest speaker.  Brynn is an entrepreneur and business founder/owner who was able to talk to students about how she uses math in her work.  She told the children that she does accounting as she makes business decisions.  Brynn’s company sells watches and she encouraged our younger children to estimate the passage of time.   They were surprised at how long a minute felt to them when they waited for 60 seconds to pass by.  Math and numbers are all around us everyday!

Fostering a positive attitude and excitement about math by having fun together with math.

Lower School students had a special meeting today with their “reading buddies,” who today became “math buddies!”  The older students helped our Lower School students play familiar and new math games that practiced fluency with math facts.

Exploring different areas of math (measuring, counting and operations, sorting, building, comparisons, patterns, shapes, etc.)

In the I ❤️ Math activities and in their daily math activities this season students in kindergarten and first grade work on:

• Numbers and operations: place value, adding, subtracting, and some first graders are working on learning multiplication!
• Algebraic thinking: first grade students are completing a unit on missing addends, which is an early algebra concept that teaches how each side of an equation are equal (9 + __ = 21,  __ + 6 = 28)
• Data collection: organizing numbers from surveys and charts
• Measurement: kindergarten students measure and compare measurements, first graders begin to learn about measuring time
• Geometry: building and taking apart 2D and 3D shapes

Highlighting interdisciplinary connections with math and numbers.

On I ❤️ Math Day this year, students connected math with literacy and science.  Ms. Hall Choi read a book to both classes about what “zero” means.  And the first grade students wrote math story problems in their journals and searched through science books for number-related facts about space topics.

Our goals were achieved and we had a math-filled day of fun, connection, and learning.