A Successful Family Math Night At Sandy Hook School

Over 300 Sandy Hook School students and their families learned about current curriculum and teaching styles in mathematics during the school’s recent “Family Math Night.”

Divided into groups of 25, students and parents attended four or five 20-minute workshops, including Fraction Factory, Multiplication Strategies, Geo Board Explorations, Data Collection, and Exemplar Exploration to better understand both mathematical content and teaching methodology.

The entire group later attended Math Expo, a series of activities emphasizing teaching tools often used in the classroom. Also included was a comprehensive sample of math resources available in the school’s library and media center, as well as a slide show presentation of students’ group work during math class.

The school’s math instructors and educational assistants helped families with the various activities throughout the evening.

 “Parents Count” packets, filled with math problems and activities, were distributed at the end of the evening.

Based on evaluation sheets completed by participants, the event was a huge success. Most parents indicated that having an opportunity to actually do activities with their children and being able to hear the rationale for how math is currently being taught provided extremely valuable information for them to use when working with their children at home.