As the saying goes, girls and boys just wanna have fun. The third- and fourth-grade teachers at the Lura A. White School put this notion to good use in the Math Carnival.
For this annual cooperative activity, each third-grade class is paired with a fourth-grade counterpart. The fourth-grade student teams randomly select skills from the third-grade curriculum such as addition with regrouping, subtraction with regrouping, and adding and subtracting money. They create a game that reinforces that concept, try the game out on their peers to work out any bugs, and then model how to play their game.
On the next-to-last day of school, the third-grade players rotated from game to game, staying at each station for about 10 minutes. The classroom where the carnival was held was filled with laughter and chattering as the players rolled dice, tossed balls, and moved playing pieces around boards while practicing math skills. Fourth-grade teacher Renee Marchand described the carnival as “a great way to introduce the third graders to fourth-grade in a positive way.”
