“Thirteen plus seven is…”
“Twenty!”
“Twenty-two plus eleven is…”
“Thirty-three!”
“Nineteen plus twenty-three is…”
“BINGO!”
Alright, I know that nineteen plus twenty-three is forty-two, but at our annual Brownie Math Meeting, it’s Bingo. We’re playing math bingo and we’re about to start another math game geared towards making math more interesting – and less intimidating – for our girls. At Math Meetings, we aim to make math fun and accessible through activities like those listed below.
Math Meetings Ideas:
- Math Bingo: call out math questions, the answers are the numbers on the bingo card
- Human Number Line: each girl is given an index card with a math question to solve, they arrange themselves in order from lowest to highest answer
- Human Bar Graph: create a bar graph of girls using a variety of criteria (favourite fruit, colour, etc.)
- Tangrams: girls make tangrams and complete tangram puzzles
- “Groups of” Scavenger Hunt: think of things that come in groups of 2, 3, 4, etc. These “groups of” are a starting point for multiplication
- Area with Floor Tiles: one floor tile = one square unit, girls race to the be fastest group to use tape to make shapes of a certain area (ex: 5 square units) then work together to find the area of all the shapes
Math Meetings aren’t just fun, they also meet program requirements. In Brownies, we connect Math Meetings to the Number Magic and Money Talk interest badges. Math also fits into the Guide program (Cookie Rising) and Pathfinder program (Moneywise; Everything Comes from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).
Math is everywhere, including Guiding. At Math Meetings, we aren’t just trying to help girls improve their mental math skills or understand concepts such as area. We aim to help our girls approach math confidently and enthusiastically. Helping girls grow up knowing they are capable in the face of challenges, in math or otherwise, is what Guiding is all about.
Guest Blogger Melissa Moor
By guest blogger Melissa. Melissa is a Queen’s University student and a Guider with the 5th Ottawa Brownies, 17th Kingston Guides, 17th Kingston Pathfinders. Melissa has also written previous blog for Girl Guides of Canada’s blog: The World Girls Want for the(ir) Future, Young Women’s World Forum 2011: Wrap-up from Switzerland, and was one of our reviewers for two books from our adult book club: Persuasion, and Everything We Ever Wanted.
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Fun ideas! Thanks for sharing 🙂 … Math is not my forte and thus not my favourite meeting to plan!
Excellent post Melissa!!! Even when I was in teacher’s college, I was incredibly disappointed to hear several people say “oh, I’m not good at math”. And that was in the Elementary level! If you don’t like it (which I also heard many times), then your kids won’t. You need to get energized by it, and this is a great way to start. Math really isn’t that hard – it’s all about how you approach it. Thanks again!! ~ Liz
In the planning for a brownie bridging night our girls are looking at doing baking with measurements, a capture the flag game (to rescue your team from jail you solve an equation) and two ideas that didn’t make the final cut but were neat – music beats and notes and “What time is it Mr Wolf?” with an analogue clock.
These are some more great ideas! Thanks for adding more activities to the list of things to do at a Math Meeting!
I personally don’t like math but I love to teach it! That moment when a girl has that “a-ha!” moment is very rewarding. Other then focusing on just numbers in equations, showing girls how math covers nearly every aspect of our lives can make it fun. 3D shapes = geometry & trigonometry. Baking = fractions. Money = fractions and decimals. Sorting in ways that you might not see directly is a fun way to gear up for math equations. “what’s the connection” game is lots of fun! Suduku is logic and we all need logic for using common sense everyday! Taking equations out while introducing other aspects of math will help lead the way back onto working with numbers directly.
We did a math night with our Brownies and completed the number magic badge and the BC STEM challenge-Math component. You can complete the BC STEM challenge as well by checking it out here: http://www.bc-girlguides.org/resources/challenge-crests/
Our girls enjoyed making symmetrical butterfly crafts, flexigons, solving number codes, solving sudoko puzzles and graphing exercises. The girls and leaders had a super fun time! 🙂
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