Below is the email I just went out about next week's math night. Don't forget that on Monday, Sima Misra (TBS Differentiated Curriculum Specialist) will be presenting a parent education event on our math program.
Dear families,
We’re excited to invite you to visit TBS on Wednesday, March 6 from 6:00-7:30 pm for our annual Math Night celebration.
The goal of the evening, which occurs near the 100th day of school, is to celebrate and learn about the mathematical thinking, teaching, and learning that occurs in our classrooms. You’ll have a chance to learn from and with your child as you play games, look at work, and experience different materials. We hope that the evening helps develop your understanding about how and why we emphasize strategies and processes of mathematical thinking, and how accurate final products develop from those deeper understandings. You’ll see the interconnectedness of our use of problem solving, reasoning, and communication, and also how we go beyond number fluency and operations to include geometry, data analysis, probability, and algebra in the curriculum.
One of the key values we hold at TBS is that our students view learning as incremental, rather than seeing themselves as “bad at writing” or “good at math.” When students believe that they become better at things with effort (a growth mindset), rather than being inherently good or bad at a particular subject (a fixed mindset), they develop resiliency when working in areas they find difficult. This permeates our program, from using the language of “gifts and challenges” in the younger grades to increasingly sophisticated self-reflection in the older grades. For this reason, we want to encourage you to model specific messages to the students during your Math Night visit. For example, we have often heard parents say some variation of “I was always bad at math”, which makes a negative identity statement, whereas saying “This is really challenging math” acknowledges the difficult work that is being done, and also leaves open the possibility of learning to master it.
Most of your time will be spent in your child’s classroom; you will not be visiting other classrooms on Math Night, though we do invite you to look at the 100s and 1000s projects from the 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms, which will be on display in the Depot. Please note that all students are expected to accompany - and lead, and teach - their parents for the duration of their visit. Because students take this responsibility very seriously, teachers and students spend considerable time coming up with specific structures and plans for the evening. To ensure that students can be as successful as possible in carrying out those plans, we ask families to support them in three key ways:
1) Help students (and any attending siblings) avoid any “off-limits” areas on campus: the play structure and the K/1 playscape will both fall into this category.
2) Keep the focus on your child as she/he leads you through mathematical activities, and save in-depth socialization for either before or after the event. Making plans with other families to get together for dinner is a great way to ensure that the socialization everyone enjoys can happen without detracting from the evening’s focus.
3) Allow your child to “run” the evening by executing the plan that she or he has developed. To parenting adults, Math Night can often seem like a perfect teaching opportunity to extend a child’s thinking to a new concept, or to give her or him a push towards mastering a new skill. However, our experience is that children see the night in very different terms: they want to show their families what they are learning and the progress they have made since the beginning of the year, and have their growth recognized and appreciated.
Even if you can only stop by for 20 minutes, we encourage you to come learn with and from your child about the mathematical teaching, learning, and thinking that occurs in our classrooms. You’ll be receiving some information from your child’s teachers shortly, if you have not already, with details about the classroom’s presentation.
I hope to see you there.
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