Tonight was Family Math Night at Griffin Elementary School. To be honest, I was a little bit disappointed with how the night turned out. First of all, we arrived late due to classmates not meeting at the correct time and us getting lost on the way. My partner could not come tonight, and although I knew that ahead of time it was frustrating as well. When we got to the school, I set up in a classroom at the end of the hallway. We were told there would be lots of students there, as many as 200 even. That was exciting. So I set up the posters and the game on my table, and waited for the students. And waited. (Remember, I came late. I was expecting to be way behind everyone else, not to have to wait for students to come to me.)
However, the students did not come in a tidal wave either. They barely began to trickle in, at most we had one family at a time in the room where there were two games set up. The students were much younger than I had anticipated, I only met one student who I was able to play the game correctly with, without having to modify the rules to help them understand. This is not because my game was too difficult, only because I was expecting to have 3rd through 5th graders and instead ended up with mostly preschool through 1st graders.
Just for a reference, in total, 8 students played my game tonight. They were the only ones who came into the room to play. Much less than I was expecting.
Here is the game that we intended to play with the students, and practiced with the 5th graders both days.
However, the students did not come in a tidal wave either. They barely began to trickle in, at most we had one family at a time in the room where there were two games set up. The students were much younger than I had anticipated, I only met one student who I was able to play the game correctly with, without having to modify the rules to help them understand. This is not because my game was too difficult, only because I was expecting to have 3rd through 5th graders and instead ended up with mostly preschool through 1st graders.
Just for a reference, in total, 8 students played my game tonight. They were the only ones who came into the room to play. Much less than I was expecting.
Here is the game that we intended to play with the students, and practiced with the 5th graders both days.
For this game, students were given a paper with four of these grids shown below. One grid was necessary for each game. The students were to play the game against one another or against a parent, each filling in one triangle at a time (similar to the idea of Connect Four) until they had formed one of the shapes. The shapes, as shown above, are worth different amounts of points. The players were allowed to block each other from completing the shapes by filling in the triangles nearby.
However, all but one of the students had to have the game modified for them. That was fine, because I know that as a SpEd major I'm going to have to get used to modifying activities to suit individual students' needs. Many of the students were able to play the game by taking turns finding and filling in the whole shapes on each of their turns. A few were too young for that, so I let them use the crayons and just color shapes on the page because they didn't understand the competition of the game.
All in all, I learned a lot from tonight. But it was frustrating to not have many students come to play the games after we put so much hard work into planning them. And I wish I had known in advance that the students were going to be so young, I would have planned a different game entirely. But oh well. It is over now, and it was a good experience to have under my belt. Not every activity is going to go perfectly in the classroom, I might as well come to grips with that now!
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