Greater Birmingham Mathematics Partnership

Building Communities of Learners and Leaders in Mathematics

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Parents

Join us for Community Mathematics Night and learn how YOU and your children's teachers can help your kids actually ENJOY and UNDERSTAND MATHEMATICS.  We promise NO TESTING and an evening that will be as FUN as it is POWERFUL!   All community mathematics nights are offered free and open to all adults.  Children 4th grade and up are also invited to all sessions except session #1.   Our next series of Community Mathematics Nights are scheduled for: 

About our Community Mathematics Nights (CMNs)    

GBMP recognizes that the support and involvement of parents and community members are vital for successful implementation of quality mathematics programs. Thus, we seek to ensure a knowledgeable public by offering Community Mathematics Nights or "CMNs" during the year at venues throughout the greater Birmingham area. During these sessions, parents and other attendees are engaged in doing middle school mathematics while considering important issues in mathematics education. These evenings are presented by the Mathematics Education Collaborative (MEC) and represent one of MEC’s unique contributions to mathematics education and our project.  Community Mathematics Nights are two hours in length and each focuses on one, two, or three big ideas that parents need to understand in order to recognize, support and/or advocate for quality mathematics programs in their schools.   They address topics such as:

·         Mathematics And Your Child’s Future: The Basics and Beyond

·         Multiplication: Will Children Know Their Basic Facts

·         How to Help Your Child with Math At Home

·         More Ideas for Helping Your Child at Home

·         Algebra and Your Child’s Future

The first CMN focuses on the importance of numerical reasoning and the need for meaning-based mathematics programs.  The second CMN uses multiplication as a context for examining the importance of a focused curriculum and what it means to teach for an in-depth understanding that results in connections among important mathematical ideas.  The next 2 sessions focus on how parents can help their kids with mathematics at home and what they can do when neither they nor their kids understand the mathematics involved in homework.  These sessions help parents learn how to engage with their children in ways that build a positive mathematical disposition. The fifth session offers a focused look at algebra as taught and assessed for understanding. 

As a result of participating in at least two of the sessions, parents learn that:

·         There are often several diverse ways of solving a mathematics problem.  By examining diverse approaches, mathematical understandings are deepened and mathematical connections are made.

 

·         Mathematics is a sense-making process and sense-making must be at the heart of the work children do in mathematics.

 

·         Teaching for understanding involves teaching mathematics in ways that help children understand relationships, not just memorize procedures.

 

·         While arithmetic is important to the doing of mathematics, mathematics is much more than just arithmetic.

 

·         Mathematics is a powerful and useful tool for making sense of information and situations in our lives and in the world around us.

 

·         All children can do important mathematics and all kids deserve a mathematics program that prepares them to be effective and powerful users of mathematics.

Our Community Mathematics Nights are open to teachers and administrators as well as parents and community members, and are designed to build a common base of experience for all educational stakeholders within participating communities. We also hope that, as a result of attending these sessions, parents will come to support the project’s efforts in ways such as volunteering in classrooms and becoming advocates for mathematics reform in the community.

Attend a Summer Mathematics Course!

Want to learn firsthand about the specialized training GBMP provides to your children’s teachers? If so, we encourage you to attend one of our 2-week summer mathematics courses.  To facilitate parents’ participation, MEC provides a limited number of scholarships to allow parents to attend the $720 course for FREE.  For details, please contact Jennifer Stoves at 934-3738.   You’ll never look at mathematics the same way again.

Please visit MEC’s website for more parent resources.

Additional Resources For Parents

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics: Illuminations

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Hosted by:
Department of Mathematics, University of Alabama at Birmingham
http://www.math.uab.edu