Collaborative Calculation: Summer Math School Focuses on Teamwork and Fun

The students stood together, pulling a piece of jump rope and manipulating it to make different shapes: a square, star, triangle, and triangular prism.
 
Thanks to an engaging math curriculum, summer school students based at Roberts enjoyed a lot of hands-on learning like this.
 
“A lot of these problems are out of the box and you have to use critical thinking skills,” teacher Alicia Whitmore explained. “With our ‘painted cube’ activity, students had to create a 4x4 cube out of sugar cubes. They had to imagine dipping them into paint in order to figure out how many sides of each sugar cube would end up with paint on them. Then, we let them actually paint the outside edges of the cubes so they could fully understand the problem.”
 
Incoming ELMS 7^th grader Sanai Rower said the teamwork – and math manipulatives – helped her see one of her least favorite subjects in a new way.
 
“I’m not a math person,” she said. “I do well in it – it’s a strong suit for me… but I’m not really fond of it. I wanted to do this math camp because I wanted to enhance my skills so I can do even better in school next year. This camp is helping me get ready for 7^th grade, and it makes math more exciting because we get to use teamwork and props to help build our skills.”
 
Classmate Atticus Tkacz-Jimenez recognized the benefit of keeping his math skills fresh over summer break.
 
“I like math because you can solve a problem in so many different ways,” he shared. “We’ve done multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, and I even did some exponents and square roots! This will help me for next year for sure. During the summer, I usually forget stuff… so this will help me remember!”
 
We’re so proud of all the students who engaged in #SCSDSummerLearning this year… we hope you have a great new school year!