Grandville — Driven by a love of math and guided by Grandville High School students, kids in grades K-5 came out in droves last week for the district’s first-ever math festival.
Held at Oakestown Intermediate School, the event featured dozens of stations, each led by a GHS student volunteer, featuring brain teasers, puzzles, hands-on games, logic questions and pattern-building activities for kids and families.
The event was the brainchild of Libby Guerink, a math teacher at GHS, who had attended a similar event at Hope College with her own kids. Inspired by that experience, she wrote and received a grant from the Grandville Education Foundation to launch the festival and purchase the math games and manipulatives from the Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival nonprofit.
‘I saw this opportunity and was like, I’d love to teach little kids about math and still have fun, because that’s how I learned. I hope they can be as excited about math as I am.’
— Abby Crater, GHS junior
The night’s purpose, she said, was simply to celebrate math in all its forms and applications.
“The goal is just getting kids to realize math isn’t scary — math is a challenge to be embraced,” Guerink said. “As high school math teachers, we know it’s a lot of puzzles and figuring things out. So I’d like to expose young kids to the idea that they can be good at math and it doesn’t always look like the (multiplication) tables and drills all the time. It can be games and activities and fun.”
At the “Apple Picking” station, Central Elementary third-grader Collin Dornbos took on 10th-grader Charlotte Baas in the two-person card game where the winner is the player who “eats the last apple.” Collin was delighted to find the two pretty evenly matched, with both winning a few games.
“It doesn’t matter who goes first or last, it just matters where you place the (cards),” he said. “You don’t want to try to flip the last card.”
Collin said he wanted to come to the festival as soon as he heard about it, because “I like math,” he said. “This is fun and I think they should do it again.”
His game partner, Charlotte, was excited to volunteer for the event as she considers a future career in teaching.
“I like being able to solve problems, because I’m a very complex thinker — I like to think through things a lot,” said Charlotte, who’s currently taking geometry at GHS. “Tonight I get to help kids solve problems the way I like to, and get used to working with younger kids, so I think that is kind of cool.”
‘As excited about math as I am’
Over at the “Skyscrapers” table, juniors Abby Crater and Elliotte Smith managed a constant stream of kids eager to put stacking blocks together in a game that resembled a 3-D Sudoku.
For Abby, who’s currently enrolled in AP Pre-Calculus, the festival was a great way to help kids find a love of math through games and puzzles, the way she learned the subject as a student at Cummings Elementary.
“Ever since I was a kid, I’ve really loved math — I’ve always been racing the next person trying to solve it first,” Abby said. “And my teachers taught me in this fun way. So I saw this opportunity and was like, I’d love to teach little kids about math and still have fun, because that’s how I learned. I hope they can be as excited about math as I am.”
Elliotte, on the other hand, described herself as the exact opposite of Abby when it comes to math. She said she never expected to find herself volunteering at a math festival, but wanted to help students think positively about the subject.
“I never really saw (math) as fun, but then slowly it became more interesting, because I like strategy,” she said. “So I want to make sure it’s not a chore for kids, and maybe help them think of it from a different perspective — like being open-minded. I know sometimes when kids don’t understand, they shut down, so I want to just be some positive reinforcement for them.”
Guerink said she was overwhelmed by the response from GHS students. After asking for 20-30 volunteers, nearly 60 students volunteered to be a part of the math festival, and she was “heartbroken” to not have a spot for everyone.
“Our kids genuinely just want to be here,” she said. “They love math, they love people, they love our schools, and that’s been fun to see. And it makes me motivated to create other ways that we can get them plugged in and involved in our schools.”
Now that the district owns these math games and manipulatives, Guerink said she’s looking for more ways they can be used district-wide, such as classroom lessons or smaller math festivals at the district’s elementary schools. She also hopes to make the K-5 math festival an annual event.
“It’s just so cool to see so many families engaged and doing something academic together,” Guerink said. “I hope they find at least one activity that they remember how good they did, or how much fun it was. Just a positive interaction with math, overall.”
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