Stewart students play math games

    Thursday night was a special night at Stewart Elementary School. The school hosted ?Math Night,? an evening of games that employ basic arithmetic such as addition and subtraction. The event wasn?t just for kids, either. The students brought their parents along to play the games with them.

    The school was divided into four main sections for ?Math Night.? In one room, kids were given cereal and asked to arrange the cereal by color on a piece of paper. In the library, kids played board games that required counting such as Yahtzee, Uno, Sorry! and Candyland. Deb Reardanz advised her grandson Bryce Reardanz in a game of Battleship with his father John Reardanz.  

    In the first floor hallway, eight posters were hung on the walls with a yes or no question for the kids. For instance, one of the questions was, ?Do you have a pet?? The kids then placed a sticker under the side that said ?yes? or the side that said ?no.? Andy Jeffrey and his sister Emily Jeffrey each removed a sticker from their packet and put it on the ?no? side. Emily is a student at Stewart while Andy is an alumnus, now enrolled at Lincoln. They are the children of Troy and Carolynn Jeffrey.

    Second-grade teacher Jane Murphy supervised the sticker survey Thursday night.

    ?We?re going to display these posters tomorrow for the kids to see,? said Murphy. ?Eventually, we?ll put this information into graph form. We?re asking our third-grade class to do that. We haven?t decided whether the kids will make the graphs or the teachers.?

    Kids also gathered in the gymnasium for more active games. Spencer Sotelo was there shooting hoops, while Makenna Conrad was there hula-hooping. A number of other children jumped rope in the gym. Spencer is the son of Scott and Angie Sotelo, while Makenna is the daughter of Nate and Janet Conrad.

    Parents who missed Math Night will have another chance at a fun event in about a month when Stewart hosts ?Reading Night? in early March. The school has three ?fun nights? a year. It already had ?Game Night? last fall.

    Debbie Jewell is a reading teacher at Stewart and has helped at the school?s fun nights. She said Game Night follows a similar theme to the other fun nights, which is to use games to educate kids while having fun.

    ?There were A-B-C games and memory games,? said Jewell. ?We played anything that would help build a reading or a math skill. Some of the games we played were even homemade. The teachers made games that utilized number or letter cards, and parents brought their own games, too.?

    Jewell said kids like to play games such as Chutes and Ladders, Connect Four and Chinese checkers. One game that she thinks is particularly educational is ?Bananagrams.? The game is similar to Scrabble in that players use letter tiles to spell intersecting words. Unlike Scrabble, in Bananagrams each player has his own board on which to arrange his tiles. The winner is the first person to use all his letter tiles.

For more, see our Jan. 28 print edition.