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Timothy Legowski, Alivia Hathaway and Lillian Martel fish for numbers from a tub of paper fish using makeshift fishing rods at a recent Math and Literacy Night at East Meadow School in Granby. After fishing, they add up the numbers to get their score. -
Melonie Burns, 3, and Joselynn Morales, 6, interact with an animatronic raptor at a table about Granby’s history with dinosaur track fossils as Magnolia Burns, 5, watches. The children were attending a recent Math and Literacy Night, formally called Dino Night, at East Meadow School. -
Nella Legowski, Lillian Martel and Alivia Hathaway play a dinosaur-themed battleship game called “Dinosaur Hide and Seek” against Timothy Legowski at a recent Math and Literacy Night at East Meadow School in Granby. -
Granby High School junior Lea Charest demonstrates Smath to Declan Randall, 7, who begins to practice putting pieces down as his mother watches, at a recent Math and Literacy Night at East Meadow School.
GRANBY — On any given night, Ted Hathaway plays board games with his two daughters, but he struggles getting his youngest to pick up a book long enough to get past the cover.
“I have to pull teeth to get her to read,” Hathaway said.
While Hathaway hopes his oldest daughter, who always has a book in her hand, will influence his youngest, the Granby Public Schools last week offered him a different option: literacy games that kept his daughter occupied for hours at Math and Literacy Night on April 16.
“It’s a change for the girls to get out of the house from the mundane,” Hathaway said. “It’s also an opportunity to get more books.”
Formally Dino Night, this extracurricular event at Granby’s East Meadow School lays out an array of math and reading games typically used in the classroom to transform instruction into a night of recreation.
Down the hall, a Scholastic Book Fair offers a buy one, get one discount to students who want a couple books to read during April and summer vacations. Jiji, the penguin mascot of the supplementary math program ST Math, waved at children as they walked into the gymnasium filled with all types of counting, arithmetic, vocabulary and spelling games.
“This allows the community and the staff to celebrate and play and interact with activities that are around literacy and math that we sometimes do within the schools, but the parents can also do outside of school,” math interventionist and event co-organizer Kristen Naglieri said. “It’s kind of giving them a little taste of what we do a good amount of the time, because if you’re learning and it’s fun, then you want to keep doing it.”
But for parents like Hathaway, Math and Literacy Night convinces his daughter to put down her tablet and finally practice the very thing she avoids: reading.
“We live in such a technological world, and it’s really hard to get students today to connect to math and literacy,” East Meadow Principal Lisa Desjarlais said.
Naglieri and Kara McMahon, reading specialist and event co-organizer, pick a selection of games that parents can easily duplicate at home. Some games are commercial board games, like Jenga with words written on the blocks, Uzzle or Smath. Others are engineered by school staff, like a fishing for numbers carnival game, multiplication races or a pot of coins addition game.
“We also pick things that are very key to their curriculum,” Naglieri said. “What is the most important thing that a first grader needs to play and do for literacy? We make sure to focus on those things, and we do that for every grade.”
The event typically attracts at least 110 students, but Naglieri said that count doesn’t include parents or children who are too young to enter kindergarten. Often times, evening extracurriculars attract extended family members as well, like grandparents, aunts and uncles.
“Many families can’t make it (to school) during the week, so night events offer an opportunity to connect families with other families and families with staff,” Desjarlais said.
Teachers and National Honors Society volunteers from Granby Junior Senior High School help run Math and Literacy Night as game opponents, demonstrators and facilitators. Juniors Ava Loughman and Lea Charest both came straight from lacrosse practice to play Smath and Uzzle with intrigued young students.
“The kids are just so sweet,” Charest said. “We both teach some of these kids as student aids, so we’re just really excited to come here and see these kids.”
Meanwhile, parents are happy to watch their children play games and chat among themselves. This was Jackie Morales’s first time attending Math and Literacy Night with her kindergarten daughter, and she really appreciates how the games engage her daughter with manipulative pieces to complete the same math equations usually written on paper.
Brian Marsh watches his son move from table to table every couple of minutes, enjoying time with friends and teachers. Kelly Ramirez said her first-grade daughter was especially excited to meet Jiji, but now she’s fully engrossed in Spelligator, a word-building game. Ramirez said her daughter likes the game so much, she’s considering buying one to use at home.
“It’s nice to having something she can get excited about … see people she knows from school and allows her to be in charge of running the show,” she said. “We’re just here to be entertained and watch.”
Emilee Klein can be reached at eklein@gazettenet.com.
