Show & tell

Local learning highlights

by Claire Atwood Student correspondent
April 17, 2007
Community connection

Math equals fun at Rogers festival

It’s carnival day at Rogers-Binford, but the kids at Rogers are fired up about something different: math. Cindy Creek and Mike Love’s first/ second-grade students hosted a math festival Friday with the help of Jodi Pope-Pfingston’s math class at Ivy Tech. “It’s helped take the edge off carnival. They’re pretty much focused and on task,” Love said.

Throughout the day every Rogers class came to visit the festival and check out interactive booths that taught skills ranging from abacus work to geometry to fractions. Visiting students explored the festival, collecting stickers for their activity check books. They even got to pick up goody bags at the end of their visit that included flying disks with “Rogers Math Festival” printed on them.

Second-grader Arden Fari helped run the estimation booth, which she made. Kids signed in on a big yellow poster and wrote down their estimates of how many Goldfish crackers were in a large bowl. “It’s really great. I’m learning how to estimate,” said Arden.

The first math festival was five years ago when Pope-Pfingston’s oldest daughter was in the Creek-Love classroom. It’s a time consuming project, so she decided to have her class at Ivy Tech co-host it as a service-learning project. Each student in her class designed a booth for the festival. “Hopefully it’s going to be every year. We want this to be an annual thing,” Pope-Pfingston said.