Remember the adage about volunteer groups, he who complains better be wiling to take charge. My DS7 is grade advanced to 3rd grade and just starting 4th grade math (he has almost completed 4th grade EPGY). The public school has no Math Club (Unlike last year’s private school). So, I have volunteered to run one. This is from a person who did not memorize his times tables until the 6th grade, still had trouble with division in the 7th, and had to fight the school to take algebra in 9th and then almost failed it. The school has agreed to let me run an after school math club (With teachers support, I hope). Not knowing what I am doing has never stopped me, I am hopeful that this will help push DS7 and encourage him as well as the other students. I will use the Mathematical Olympiads for 4th and 5th grade; I think the competition could be fun. I will use problems from the math Olympiad contest problems, in a problem or problems of the week format. Their will be awards and I hope to keep it fun with some things I picked up from the Math Magician book and videos on mental math. I just hope I don’t make it to hard, and that I can keep it fun. I think I will call them Mathletes and use warm ups and the concept of stretching, and then practicing to be a better mathlete. Any other ideas would be helpful.

Hi Edwin,

UCLA runs a math club (added little ones K-5th this year) on Sundays 2-4 p.m. It is a great math program. You can get more information if you google math circle, ucla. My dd is now studying number theory with the middle schooler group.

Anyway, perhaps looking at what they are doing might help.

Edwin - we have a thread here about running a math club as someone here was quite active in a math club.

Good luck!!!

Thanks Bianca, I have met an instructor over their with our DS17. They have a nice math circle group, but that one was more for HS level. I can e-mail the person and try and find out more.

I will be watching this thread with interest as I was going to suggest starting a math club at my daughter's school! Great timing and good luck!

Edwin, I commend you for your bravery! Good luck with the club. I am sure the kids will love it!

Bravo, Edwin! Good luck with it.

Today was the first day of the math club for my DS7s school. I sent out packages to the 9 teachers that teach 4th and 5th grade at my son’s school. I anticipated 15 to 20 students to be interested. I was planning on using the library for this group. Well today we had 55 to 60 students saying they would attend. From this 45 came to our first meeting along with about 25+ parents. So far so good, just many more students then I planned for. The good thing is that 5 parents volunteered to help out, and the PTA may provide snacks for our once a week after school club (Which now meets in the cafeteria). In regards to DS7, he seemed to enjoy it. I will hopefully break the students into smaller manageable groups. Today I had 10 groups of 4 to 5 students. I find this to be a great opportunity to see the different levels of math ability, it helps me with the yard stick issue for DS7. There are a few good mathematicians in the group. On a funny note some of the parents are a little to helpful with the math problems, but you can see many of them enjoy a good puzzle. One of the questions for fun. If a bat and a ball together cost $1.10, and the bat is $1.00 more then the ball, how much is the ball. Please note everyone I ask gets it wrong.

Fun!!

Sneaky math problem - I won't give the answer so as not to ruin it for anyone else

I hope that this exists in my son's school in the next few years or so as I think he would love it!

Well done Edwin!!! I adore my maths club. I'm currently working on Knickerbocker, knickerbocker number nine! What this looks like in practice is...

Adding 9 with numbers less than 20, from 20-100, from 100-900 and some 2400-2500 – just trying to get the kids to use 10 minus 1 strategy to get the answer quicker than counting forwards. Once the kids see the pattern and get used to using the strategy, I move to adding 19, 29 and 39. I use dice and just random number flashcards to provide a visual cue. Fast and furious is my aim...

I then get the kids to practice on target hunt on www.ictgames.com/100huntadd9.html to try and get their answer times under 5 seconds. You can't do this for too long, as many of the kids pick up the visual pattern very quickly so I just let them do this for 2-3 minutes.

We then move to multiplication. I first get the students to find the pattern of the nine timestable on a number grid and then skip count by 9 a couple of times backwards and forwards. If the kids are particularly kinesthetic, we physically jump up and down a number line while doing this. And then I put the 'nailpolish' stickers (old fashioned price tags) on their fingernails and we work out the visual cue. (-- you know the one where you use your fingers to do the 9 timestable?)

Once we roll the dice a few times to get confidence up that the system actually works, they then go back to the computer to do 9 timestable practice on www.multiplication.com

There's not normally time to do subtraction by 9s, but I always make sure that I'm doing multiplication and division at the same time so that they see the linkages.

I do this with two year 3-4 kids (which down-under means kids around 8 and 9 years). The faster the better. The more hands-on stuff I can come up with, the better. And the more drills I can work in without the kids knowing they're being drilled, the better!

Anyway, hope this might give you some inspiration for your next session... jojo