"I got it!" These three words may be some of the most gratifying to hear from a child.
In Sierra Canyon's Lower School Math Program, this resounding HUZZAH! of understanding is often echoed as students use manipulatives to make sense of challenging problems and draw out their reasoning to make their thinking visible. This common refrain is also habitually heard during Math Team practices. This week, the program offered many opportunities for students to flex their creative skills in scale drawing and Lego-building of Halloween cats, ghosts, and pumpkins, practicing their proportional skills and geometric comprehension of topics like symmetry. They pounced on the cats with feline focus, exercised ethereal effervescence in galvanizing their ghosts, and OMG (Oh my gourd!), squashed Legos together to build pulchritudinous pumpkins. Using only 4 x 2 bricks posed a worthy challenge as they needed to rotate and fit them into this geometric symmetry exercise. Take a look at some of their work!
The Lower School Math Teams, consisting of Kindergarten–6th Grade students, also participated in the first of six Caribou Cup contests, and the results were staggeringly successful:
- Out of thousands of students worldwide, Sierra Canyon had seven perfect scores, placing these Kindergarten through 4th Grade students in the top one-percentile ranking: Echen L. '36, Jonathan S. '35, Nathan F. '35, Amin T. '34, Olivia C. '34, Isaac I. '34, and Grayson C. '32.
- The 3rd and 4th Grade teams had eight students who placed in the top ten percentile alone: Grayson C., Kabir S. '32, Ranveer S. '32, Sophia O. '33, Ayaan R. '33, Daniel L. '32, Nathaniel T. '32, and William C. '33.
- Our 6th Grade students Adam C. '30, Layla D. '30, and Lilah F. '30 placed comfortably within the top twenty percent of over 16,000 students their age!
Like the other contests in which our teams engage, Caribou features problems that often fall outside mainstream curricula. There is a prominence of spatial reasoning questions, something from which the love of Legos and drawing benefits. Parents can take the opportunity to add subtle questions and observations that explore a more mathematical approach to more playful contexts.
The next Caribou contest is coming up on Wednesday, November 15. Along with it is the Noetic Learning Contest, which will also fall in mid-November. If your child is not on the Lower School Math Team, but this sounds like fun, do not hesitate to reach out to Coach Keller at [email protected].
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