First Night of Math Enrichment

Along with spending time in a fifth grade classroom once a week tutoring children in literacy, I have the opportunity to work with a fourth grade student once a week for the next few months to enrich her mathematical skills. I am really looking forward to this experience because I am majoring in mathematics so I get to put my specialty area to use.

With that said, yesterday was my first time meeting the fourth grade student. Every Monday night, I will have an hour to spend with her doing math lessons and activities that will help enrich her math skills. I spent this first hour getting to know more about her and pre-assessing her knowledge of mathematics. I found out that she had also been part of this math enrichment program last year that other college students and I participate in so she told me she is looking forward to it again this year. Once I found this out I asked her what she liked about the program last year and what she hoped to get from it this year.  She said she liked learning about something math related before her teacher taught it in class because then she was familiar with the material ahead of time. I will keep this in  mind as I plan lessons and activities to do with her each week.

Originally this math enrichment experience was supposed to involve more students. However now that it is in action each college student including myself just has one student each to work with. Now that I have gotten to know more about my student I feel as though working with her individually will actually be more beneficial than if each group had more than one student. Through an interest inventory survey that I completed with her I found out that she enjoys reading and writing but not math as much. I hope that working with her the next few months and doing engaging and interesting math lessons will help her grow to like mathematics more. Learning about and doing math can be fun as long as the lessons and methods of teaching the skills are interesting. That is what I am for...to help create fun and engaging ways to get children to learn mathematics.

During the pre-assessment where I asked her a few basic math problems that children her age should know she was very good at finding the solutions. In fact, in one question I asked her I tried to solve it too and her and I got different answers. When we checked over our work it turns out I was the one who had a made a mistake and she was able to find my mistake and show me how to solve it correctly. I was very impressed! As we were running through estimation and division problems she taught me some clever poems that she had learned from her teachers to help her remember how to solve those kinds of problems. I wish I had been taught creatively like that when I was learning about division and estimation. I can tell both her and I are going to learn a lot these next few months.

I am already eager to go back next week and spend time doing math with this fourth grader.