In November I worked with the president of Matrix (a mathematics club at the University of Illinois) to create and run an after school math club at a local elementary school, Dr. Howard Elementary. This semester of meetings have come to a close and I want to reflect on what I have learned, and what I hope the club will be able to do in the future.
At the beginning of the club I had trouble determining what level of activities I should be doing with the students, since I am being trained in secondary mathematics and this is an elementary school (3rd-5th graders were the members we had). It seemed like the elementary students understood mathematical topics easier and also plainly knew more than what I thought they should at their age (and from my previous experience working with 6th-10th graders). We played a positive and negative number game that worked with adding and subtracting combinations of positive and negative numbers since the students that I worked with at the higher grades struggled with algorithm. The elementary students were very comfortable adding and subtracting the integers accurately.
I learned a lot about classroom management as well, but in the sense of controlling a class of elementary students who want to run around versus the class of high school students who do not want to learn math that will be in my future. I really learned how to lead a club versus leading a classroom, I didn't want to make the students have this time feel like another class.
We did many other projects, which are detailed here. I learned about a project that I wish I was able to do with my after school club called the Reel Math project. It is a project where the students take a problem and make it creative and make a video about it. This would be a great thing for after school, and there are various levels of problems. The student videos also get judged later for a prize.
Has anyone run an after school math club before? What activities did you do? I want to build my arsenal for middle school and high school clubs.
