Yesterday was another day of basketball practice and it was the boys' turn for late practice. It was my turn to supervise "study hall", or the boys who were waiting to go to practice. One of the students' parents came to supervise, but I was the teacher back-up supervisor. My 6th grade boys were trying to do their math homework, but the 3rd and 4th graders didn't have any homework to do (or they had finished it all) so they were being kind of noisy. Finally one of my boys said, "If you don't be quiet, we're going to give you some math problems!" One 3rd grader piped up, "YES! Give us some problems!" I thought he was kidding, but he was serious!
My 6th grader quickly scrawled some easy multiplication problems on a paper and handed it to the 3rd grader. He yelled for a pencil. Seeing that there were none available and he was still being noisy, I volunteered to write some on the board and he could work them out up there.
I have never seen a student so excited to do math. Pretty soon all the other 3rd and 4th grade boys were asking for their own problems to do on the board. They they wanted some extra hard multiplication (749 x 4)... then really hard addition problems (one boy said, "give me something in the millions!")... some of the 7th graders decided to see how smart these 3rd and 4th graders really were and tried to throw in some tricky division with decimals. They didn't get it. So with the 7th graders' and my help, we figured it out together. It was so neat to see these grades getting along, working together, and doing math!
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