Math Mania is Lowell’s Latest Craze

Students and teachers in the Primary School are connecting in a way like never before. What’s the new craze sweeping through the building every other week? Math Mania!

Math Resource Teacher Cristina is leading the charge for the new program, which alternates with Gatherings on Wednesday afternoons. And, much like Gatherings, Math Mania is designed to build community between different grade cohorts. Three grade bands (Kindergarten and 1st grade; 2nd and 3rd grade; 4th and 5th grade) mix among themselves and rotate through four activities, each of which is designed to highlight age-appropriate math skills. With twelve stations in total, every teacher and specialist is also participating and supporting students. 

Student interests have guided the activities in some stations. Others are inspired by teacher ideas, like the popular “Un-Maker Space,” created by Academic Technologist Daniel, to look inside common electronics and the math that makes them possible. The mix of activities shifts focus between spatial reasoning, fast math facts, logic, sequencing, and more, ensuring that there is something for everyone. 

“Math mania is an opportunity for our students to come together in community around our collective love of mathematics. Math is one of the topics that even adults refer to as a deficit, like saying, ‘Oh, I’m not a math person.’ Part of our goal with Math Mania is to make it clear that anyone can participate in math and have fun doing it,” says Primary School Director Justin. “Many of the games we introduce connect with a growth mindset. They’re not designed for mastery on the first try, so students get to test several different solutions.” 

For example, Emily set a challenge in her classroom for 4th and 5th graders to contain “ninja bed bugs” on a grid. Working with dry-erase markers on laminated sheets, students drew and redrew multiple rectangles to contain all the bugs. Sounds easy, right? But scores are based on the total area of the rectangles used plus the square of the number of rectangles used. Winning scores are as low as possible! There’s no one answer, and participants can constantly try to improve their scores. Some student teams were convinced they had a winning strategy, such as one big rectangle to contain all the bugs at once, but reassessed and brainstormed alternate solutions eagerly throughout the half-hour session. Try out this activity for yourself.

Because students are rotating classroom activities each session, they are bonded by trying something new together. It has also been an equalizer since every student comes to the activity with fresh eyes, excited to learn something completely new. Perhaps the most exciting observation from Cristina is “no one couldn’t do an activity or didn’t want to do it.” With a high level of engagement from week to week, students were practically running to each location. 

Teachers, too, have enjoyed connecting with other grades, checking in with students they previously taught, and getting to know friends who may join their classroom next year. Specialists have been able to observe different strengths in the students they see regularly, who may not flex their math muscles in the art studio, for example. “Teachers have also gotten really creative to be able to come up with activities that can engage multiple grades,” says Cristina. 

By this point in the year, every Primary School student has rotated through the four centers. Cristina hopes to complete two more full rotations by the end of the school year, refreshed with new activities that continue to challenge and delight our young mathematicians!