Running head: MATH NIGHT SUMMARY 1

Math Night Summary

Denise Torres

Pittsburg State University

MATH NIGHT SUMMARY 2

Math Night Summary

Introduction

Preparing for our Math night took extensive planning on my partner, Maddi and Is part.

We were separated within the grade level we are observing during our internship semester. In

this small group, we were placed with a partner; Maddi and I got algebra. Maddi came up with

the idea of doing a baseball game where the students would evaluate numerical expressions that

contain parentheses, brackets, or braces. The students need to use a strategy to use to solve the

number sentence presented. I will begin by talking about the preparations that went in to this

math project as well as some preconceptions our students. I will include highlights of that night

as well as some thoughts of what I would have done different. Furthermore, I have included

some of the anecdotal notes and quotes from math night. To conclude, I will discuss some of the

highlights of the night, adding what went right, wrong, and what I would change.

PREPARATION

Maddi and I maintained in contact between classes and texting back and forth. Since

Maddi lives in Missouri and was barely ever in Pittsburg unless she was in class, we decided to

communicate with each other through text messaging and we also talked in between classes, and

collaborated in class. We kept a log to record what we were doing, when we were doing it. On

March 3, during class we worked on our lesson plan and outline. On March 14th and 16th, we

continued to fill out the lesson plan and began to talk about the materials we were going to need

for our activity. On March 26th, I had gone to the store to round up the materials we were going

to need such as the poster and some foam boards to create baseballs. On March 27th, we had to

finish our lesson plan for our peer demonstration. This peer demonstration helped us make a few

changes to our lesson. Some of these changes include creating math problems that were geared to
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the younger crowd such as kindergarten, and 1st grade. On March 31st, we began to work on our

poster and on April 3rd, we finished the lesson plan and handed it in. On April 4th, we did all the

gluing on our board in-between classes and presented it at St. Marys elementary school.

PRECONCEPTIONS

Writing out the lesson plan for our activity was not hard because we knew what standards

we need to hit and we knew our activity was not too complicated. We needed to use our

resources to find our students preconceptions about students regarding our topic. Here are some

of the preconceptions Maddi and I came up with:

Students may not follow the correct order of operations.

Students often forget to keep place value when completing multi-digit operations.

Students may add the carried over number to the top number of a multiplication problem

before multiplying the tens place value and beyond.

To help the students with these preconceptions we had to provide the student with strategies to

help them understand order of operations. Many if not all our students knew at least one math

operation, with the older students that were in 3rd grade or older they knew in what order they

need to work a problem that had parentheses. With the younger crowd, we needed to help them

understand the use of patterns and use it as a strategy. Since we didnt know much about the

students individual level of math we asked them what grade they were I and if they knew what

the 4 basic math operations were. By asking them these questions we would one, know what

grade they were in and what level of math they should know, and two, by knowing if they knew

the 4 math operations it would help us know what their knowledge was of those operations.

According to Piaget children in the concrete operations stage are developing seriation and

classification. (Ojose, B. 2008). Seriation is the ability to place numbers or objects in order, and
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classification is the ability to group objects with a common characteristic. We designed our

lesson plan with 5th graders and their abilities in mind. We knew based on our observations in

our internship that students at this grade level knew how to interpret numerical expressions.

Another thing that they knew how to do was use multiple strategies to solve multiplication,

division, addition, and subtraction problems. Therefore, for this activity we had to differentiate

our instruction for other grade levels.

HIGHLIGHTS

Personally math night was very fun, I think it was because we had such a great turn out

for kids. The attendance of students to math night made it more motivating because it meant that

they were there to learn and have fun. We had to improvise because kids younger than

kindergarten were participating in our activity, so that kept me on my toes, just thinking what we

could ask. With the younger crowd, in pre-school we had them count or gave them a work

problem with pictures. My favorite part of the evening was when several sutdents came back to

our game just because they like working math problems. I liked that Maddi, and I were able to

bring the game to be interactive. Having constant kids made us tweak our lesson plan in order to

reduce the time spent talking and more on the activity.

IN ACTION

At the beginning of math night it was not hectic, so we had time to introduce the lesson

without having to hurry into the activity. We walked thorught our lesson plan almost word rof

word untilmore kids arrived. By the time we realized that more kids had arrived and were done

eating, we had to change a few things in our lesson, for example we would introduce ourselves,

ask the students for their name and then ask them what grade level they were in and if they knew

what the math operations were. Then we move on to expalining the rules of the game as simple
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as we could, and began to play. If we had 6 kids in a line we would give everyone a math

problem if they were batting and the last person would answer and make a home run so that the

inning would end. Also, since the kids answered correcly we didnt have any outs so we had the

bases loaded. It wasnt until the third group of students that we realized we need to ask the

students what strategies helped them solve certain problems. For some students it was clear what

strategy helped them, which was counting with their fingers, but for others skip counting or like

one student said I took 4 and added 4 and added 4 three times to get 12.

QUANTITATIVE

Understanding
7

1
0 1 2 3 4 5
The students approched the game with with

majority being above stage 3. More than 50% of the 7 students understoof the concept

development which means that 55% understood all of the concepts and was able to use a deeper

connection, leaving about 45% of the students to understand all the concepts without making that

deeper connection.

Strategies
7

1
0 1 2 3 4 5
Most of the students 85% were able to get the answer

without help. This was because sutdents were able to use strategies taight to them in class. This
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means that 85% of the studetns had a clear understing of how to solve the problem. We had one

student in first grade who said Oh, 7+6? as she began to count our on her fingers seven plus 6

and then she repeated to check herself. While we had 15% of the students on stage 3 where they

were able to find a solution with minor errors meaning that they may have to check themselves

like the first grade student that I helped.

When it comes for the students to proved an

Explanations
explanation to their work about 71% of them were
7
6
at a stage 3 which means that their explanation was
5
4
clear. We had a student who we asked how he got
3
2
the answer he did he said The parathesis go first
1

0 1 2 3 4 on the order of opertions, once you do whats inside

then you x the parentheses out and do the math. This student was able to to walk me throught

his problem solving and give a a short explanation. We had 29% of the students that we recorded

scoring at a stage 2 where they were able to exlan some of the steps they used. Student 5s math

problem was (18/3) x 2 , when asked to explain how he solved the proble he said cuz I know

you do paranthesis first and then I used mental math. What he didnt explain is why you do

paranthesis first and what mental math is he talking about.

4.5
3.857142857
4 3.571428571
3.5
3 2.714285714
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
1 2 3

Series1
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We are looking at the mean here and what I can observe is that students are more able to use

strategies that they have learned, yet the lack the explanation of their answers.

QUALITATITIVE

During math night we observed several trends. One metatrend is order of operations,

which students were using told math equations. Students when solving math problems that

included parenthes, they knew that this was the first step to solve the problem. One student said

Did the stuff in the parantheses first then I did the other operation with the other numer. When

working with order of operation many teachers use the acronym PEMDAS, which the letter

stand s for: parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. Therefore,

students know that when given a math problem that has a parentheses, it always goes first, we

asked a student how he was able to divide (18/3)x2 he said I know you do paranthesis first.

CONCLUSION

Math night was fun, it was a good review of the material that students have been learning

in class. I learned about myself that its hard for me to come in with a subject like math and not

know what they student is working on. One its hard for the student to open up in the time you

have with them which in some cases its less than 5 minutes. Therefore, the experience is not as

memorable as it would be in our internship classroom where we feel comfortable and we know

what our students have been working on. Through this whole process of planning up to math

night it was clear what the expectations were, and what we needed to do. I feel that both and my

partner executed a good lesson plan with a fun activity.

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Here are some of the pictures we took during math night.

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References

Fincher, B. (2017). Concrete Operations [Class Handout]. Department of Education, Pittsburg

State University, Pittsburg, KS.

Ojose, B. (2008). The Mathematics Educator. Applying Piaget's Theory of Cognitive

Development to Mathematics Instruction, 18(1), 26-30.