SNAP Math Fair Reflection

I was very excited to see how everyone in the class had presented their problems and how they would implement them to a student. As I pondered about what the class would look like when we had it all set up it reminded me of the way I would prepare for a science fair when I was in Junior High, and I loved the science fair because that is where I could bring my creative ideas out and collaborate them with scientific ideas and experiments. I have never done a Math fair when I was in school but I was so pleased with the way everyone presented their problems and collaborated it with their creative-teacher side! 

I think the main reason I liked doing science fair project was because there was a lot of time and effort put into this one topic and I was so familiar with the project that I created, that it made me feel proud. The same feeling was felt today when I explained our Math problem to the people who visited our display. I felt that I was teaching them how to do something that I had spent a lot of time and effort working with and creating and it felt liberating to teach it to someone who may have never seen the problem before. 

Everyone has a different way of interpreting and explaining something and I think that it one thing in this project that was seen very prominent, it did not matter how the problem was interpreted and  played out, that was the individuality part of the fair, as long as we understood what the problem was asking us to do. I enjoyed Penny's problem with the greedy pigs and I also enjoyed Stacy's Sudoku problem, I actually never tried a Sudoku problem before and I always thought they looked difficult, maybe because they were numbers but I was impressed that I could work on this problem. 

I really loved the math fair and I defiantly think it is something that I would endorse in the school I will work at because math is a very important part of the curriculum. Seriously, why not have a math fair? there are science fairs and heritage fairs, but why not math fairs? This is such a fun and creative way to present math problems to students. If I were to hold a math fair in my classroom I would give my students lots of class time to work on their project because I think most of the time parents do a lot of the work at home for the students so that it can be done and "over with" faster. This is sad because the most beneficial part of a fair is the time and effort put into working out the problems or finding answers to the question or exploring or researching. I really believe children learn a lot through inquiry and there is definitely a reward aspect to solving or understanding something on their own, even if they do not reach the "correct" solution, there is value in their inquiry and the though put into trying to figure out and solve the problem.