written by Little Elk River students Azalea Eischen and Lilah Kottke

Yami, Walter and Audra find the square root of 5,929.

In Little Elk River, we currently have three different math groups: Hypatia, Pythagoras, and Lovelace. Next year we will have four. They are all named after mathematicians. We are in Lovelace. Every couple weeks or so we have a set of 10-15 “problems” to complete, for lack of a better word. Right now the problems include measuring the interior angles of different polygons, cubing binomials, finding equivalent fractions, and adding/subtracting fractions with unlike denominators, and division with decimal fractions. We just started learning how to add positive and negative integers. Today we are going to learn about probability by picking colored legos out of a mystery bag. We’re not sure yet what that’s about. Slowly but surely, we are also working on filling in our Math and Geometry dictionaries. John gives us terms in sets of five and we have to try to define them. We will be able to take our dictionaries with us to the adolescent community when we leave Upper Elementary.

Though the Lovelace group meets once or twice a week for presentations, or correcting the problems that we worked on independently, we are expected to do some kind of math every day. Sometimes that means choosing and making our own problems. We can make problems for our each other, too. We think that this math group is good because it help us to do math on a regular basis.