Overall, I think that math night went really well and my activity, the "Pattern Walk" worked really well with the grades that came. Even though there was not as much people who showed up as we thought, it almost worked better with my activity to have smaller groups because we could help the kids with the activity and their parents could play with them. We also had some kids who were younger than kindergarten who had difficulties following the game and walking around the square following the pattern, and realized that this game is good for specifically K through forth or fifth grade. I think that this math night helped me to develop skills as a future teacher to learn ways to explain things such as math and learn to change plans when things aren't working in a classroom.
I noticed many differences from how the kids played this game at family math night to the fifth grade who we practiced on. The fifth graders could easily understand that the game was about patterns and they could repeat the pattern once they knew and saw it written on the whiteboard. On the other hand, at family math night, the kids had more difficulty following it and the young ones would sometimes get confused knowing which way to go around. Also I think that the game was way more interesting for kindergarteners through about 3rd grade because they had to really focus to repeat their patterns and count the number of spaces they walked.
From this activity, I noticed many different things about student thinking. I saw that there were many students who caught on to the game very quickly. Others had to be physically shown what to do around the pattern square and some kids just had to follow what other kids or their parents were doing to catch on. Also I noticed that some kids thought about following the pattern differently by saying that they could just count the pattern going around the square in one direction. I saw that a lot of the kids understood that the purpose of our game was to follow a pattern as we explained to them and others just focused on counting the steps they took.
By observing the ways the kids thought about my activity, I found many effective techniques of teaching that I could use in the classroom. For example, I found that it is very important when explaining something to repeat it many times. When you repeat it many times, it allows you to explain something in different ways that can click differently with different kids. In my activity I saw that the kids understood better when I explained a couple ways and also demonstrated. Also I found that as a teacher you have to improvise sometimes to make things work best in a classroom. In my game, we had to change some things because it wasn't working at first such as just telling the kids the pattern, we learned that they need to see it on a white board to be able to do it on their own.
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