While athletes at the 2010 Winter Olympics have been competing in Canada for weeks, youngsters a little closer to home recently had an Olympics of their very own.
Above: Students in Marietta Knight’s kindergarten class practice writing numbers at the Math Olympics held at the Monmouth Junction Elementary School last week. Below: Fourth-graders Rahul Patel, Michelle Pan and Simerjot Khurana play Number Heads with a deck of cards to practice their division and multiplication. PHOTOS BY JENNIFER BOOTON Monmouth Junction Elementary School in South Brunswick had a schoolwide Math Olympics last week in an attempt to motivate students to learn math, increase school spirit and highlight a current event.
The opening ceremonies for the 2010 Math Olympics commenced on Feb. 9. Students passed a plastic torch from fifth grade to kindergarten and announced the beginning of a week of mastering math facts. The students practiced math, took quizzes to mark their improvement, and colored in one Olympic ring each day until the closing ceremonies on Feb. 23, concluding the weeklong event with gold medals for everyone.
Olympic music rang through the auditorium during the opening and closing ceremonies as the students passed the torch and received their medals.
“We were trying to take the impact of the 2010 Winter Olympic games and bring it to the school level,” said Sharon J. Monasch, an instructional support teacher.
Math difficulty varied depending on each grade, from kindergartners learning how to write numbers to fifth-graders learning division. The intent was to have every child improve his or her auto-math-fact knowledge in a fun and self-motivating way.
The mathletes, or math athletes, practiced for a portion of the day and were quizzed to track their improvement. For every day they completed their tasks, the class would color in another Olympic ring to be displayed outside the classroom.
Ten-year-old Rohit Kothare, a fourth-grader at the school, said his favorite practice games were Rocket Math and Around the World because of the speed and competitiveness of the games.
In Rocket Math, students race against the clock to try to reach their individual goals.
“They make progress at their own level, so it’s very self-motivating,” Jan Zeeman, a thirdgrade teacher, said of the game. “We love it.”
Fourth-grader Alekaya Thota explained that they were playing fun games while improving their math skills at the same time.
“We get to play games, but we are still learning,” she said.
Another game called Number Heads, played by fourth-graders Rahul Patel, Michelle Pan and Simerjot Khurana, used a deck of cards to practice multiplication and division. Two students would place a card on their forehead while the other would shout out the product. The cardholders would then have to guess the number on their card.
The students in Marietta Knight’s kindergarten class also seemed excited to improve their math facts. The kindergartners practiced writing numbers in boxes and noted that the object was to try to fill in as many boxes as possible.
Many participants said it was interesting to partake in an Olympics at school while the real 2010 Winter Olympics were taking place in Vancouver.
“The real Olympics are going on,” Kothare said. “It’s like you’re team USA; you just want to do your best math.”
Eight-year-olds Mitchell Fisher and Craig Bruder of the third grade agreed and noted that the Olympic rings they were coloring in each day were the same ones featured at the Winter Olympics.
“They’re on the winter Olympics, too,” Fisher said of the rings.
“I like seeing the signs on the doors,” Bruder said.
Principal Maribeth Edmunds said she was very proud of the school, students and teachers for “creating and participating in an event that’s creative and academic at the same time.”
Edmunds added that the Math Olympics benefit all kids at the school. The games show the student body that learning math can be fun, she said.
“Each year [the teachers] try to come up with something that inspires, motivates and brings the whole school together to learn math,” Edmunds said. “I have to commend the teachers for coming up with a very motivating idea.”