By Wayne Hinshaw
Salisbury Post
Hey, it’s winter ó with real snow, even. At Cleveland Elementary School, that makes this a great time to have the Accelerated Math Winter Carnival and reward the third- through fifth-grade students for their hard work. Mixed with the fun, they would have to use their newly acquired skills.
Teacher Joy Jenkins arranged eight stations for the third-fifth grade students to move through on a 15-minute rotation on Wednesday. With other teachers, assistants and community volunteers helping, it went like clockwork.
Stations included Winter Bingo Blitz, Fraction Snow, Snow Golf, Winter Construction, Snowball Fight, Paper Snow-flakes, Winter Bracelets and What’s Your Snow Angel: A Square or a Rectangle?
The students’ favorite was tossing balls of recycled paper at trash cans from behind two lines ó the Snowball Fight. With students working against the clock, their aim quickly moved from the trash cans to other students. The students then had to count the balls, first by ones and then by tens.
Are you a square or rectangular snow angel? To find out, use a tape measure to measure your arm span and height. If they measure the same, you are a square. If the two measurements differ, you are a rectangle. The fun is when your arm span or height is more than the length of the tape measure. That requires addition.
Hitting a cotton ball on a table top with a plastic spoon becomes Snow Golf. What’s the point, you might ask? You must take a yard stick and measure the distance you hit the cotton ball. Some hit the ball farther than the 36-inch yard stick, and measuring the distance became a challenge. The game evolved into Bad Breath Golf, with the students blowing the cotton ball and then measuring their progress.
Hard-working students need refreshments. Each student was given a snow cone and two flavors to choose from: blue raspberry and purple grape. But these were fraction snow cones. A student could request a whole, half, one-third or two-thirds portion of each flavor for the snow cone ó as long as the total came to one whole. Some ordered two-thirds and one-third of the flavors.
“This is cool,” one student said. And it was. The temperature outside was around 32 degrees for the winter carnival.
The two-hour project helped students have fun and learn.
Students who had not met their goals in math spent the two hours in class being tutored and hoping that they could improve their grades and receive the reward of the next winter carnival.