Family Math Night Activity #9

    For my weekly work, I decided to work on improving my family math night activity and think of ideas that could make it a better game for many different math abilities. For my game, my partner and I created a "cake walk" number game where kids have to follow patterns by walking around a circle with numbered squares. The kids had to pull a winning number from a hat to see which square would be the winning spot when music is played and stopped. Then the kids had to pick other numbers from a hat depending on the grade level and follow the pattern of numbers by going back and forth around the circle following the numbers that were drawn. I found out which parts of the game were fun for kids, which need improving, and how to reinforce the math concept of patterns. 

    The idea of my activity was to work with patterns using numbers and help kids to work with addition and subtraction with a game that uses motion to learn. For the younger kids we will do simple patterns such as two or three numbers but the older kids will do more. To incorporate math into the game for older kids I noticed and will use the idea that as kids moved forward and back, they move forward or back a certain net amount. For example if they moved forward seven and back five they will be moving up two spaces each time they repeat the pattern. This can also be calculate if there are three or more numbers added to the pattern and kids see this math at the end of each pattern.
    Example: 7 forward + 5 backward = total two spaces forward
                    6 forward + 4 backward + 3 forward= total five spaces forward
                    4 forward + 7 backward + 2 forward + 3 backward= total four spaces backward

    Overall I think that my math activity went very well because the kids said that they enjoyed the game and wanted to keep playing. I found that it was hard for them understand the whole concept at first and we had to demonstrate and participate in the cake walk with them at first until they understood. Also it was appropriate for their age and will be for the younger ones as well. When we asked them for feedback all of the groups said that we should make the number patterns smaller for younger kids because it was challenging to follow large patterns.

    To improve this math game, I came up some ideas that would make the game run more smoothly and help incorporate more patterns. First of all I think by having a white board to write the number patterns down would help kids to visually see the patterns and follow them more easily on their own. Also I think that adding more numbers to the squares would be beneficial because there were blank square between numbered ones and sometimes there was two winners because a winning number was in between two kids. I think that this activity is very successful in making math patterns fun and the students feedback has greatly helped to improve it.