Queen Elizabeth School principal, Ryan Mather, assists a young student with group pentominoes geometry activities during a “Math-ternoon” event to mark World Math day. Geoff Lee Meridian Source
On World Math day, everything added up to a fun “math-ternoon” of learning at Queen Elizabeth School.
Principal Ryan Mather set the tone last Wednesday afternoon by wearing a T-shirt with the slogan, “5 out of 4 people have a problem with fractions.”
“Math is fun,” said Mather.
“Math-ternoon is a chance for all of our kids in Queen Elizabeth School to experience math in a different way.”
Mather says the kids get to go with a different teacher with a variety of kids from different classes and do some math activities that they might not normally get to do in their own classroom.
A Grade 6 student whose first name is Teala stepped forward to explain what math her group was up to.
“We did adding and subtracting and estimation,” she said, using whiteboards and cards.
When asked what else she learned, the youngster replied, “Math was a lot of fun.”
Meanwhile, Mather led a session helping students to work with pentominoes to solve geometry problems.
Pentominoes are shapes that use five square blocks joined edge to edge to form various combinations.
“There are 12 different ways the squares can be put together so the sides are touching,” said Mather.
“They had to use those to solve a variety of puzzles, so they had to turn them, flip them—do all sorts of things to complete a puzzle.”
A Grade 5 girl named Emery provided her “kid” description of what pentominoes are all about.
“Pentominoes is a bunch of blocks where you got to figure out shapes by like 4 times 5, so you got to find the 4 by 5 and try to put them together to make a rectangle or a square and there should be 12 pieces,” she said.
She was also candid when asked if she was good at math.
“Kinda, I have my rough times where I can’t figure stuff out,” she said with a grin.
Emery and other students also put their math skills to the test with some technology games, probability dice rolling and some work with cards.
“There was a whole variety of different skills in math,” said Mather.
Emily who is in Grade 5 dove into estimation and note symbols.
“We learned subtracting and adding numbers that were the note symbols,” she said.
Math-teroon drew some extra help from Jason Neville, the divisional director of education, along with Debbie Kruchkowski, consultant of learning and instruction.
“We also had our tech lead, Cornelius Krahn come from College Park School,” said Mather.
The event conveniently provided an opportunity for Mather to relive his math teaching days.
“Now that I’m a principal, unfortunately, I don’t get to teach math as often as I like,” he said. “This was all about making math fun and getting kids to think math is awesome.”
