I Feel Good, Na Na Na Na Na, I Feel Good......

I had the coolest experience this week. Wednesday afternoon I found myself tending the big after school math enrichment program held in my friend's class room. We had 14 students grades 1-5. One group was gathered around the computer designing a pie chart for the data the Tuesday group had collected on their Favorite Dessert study. Celine, my friend, colleague and partner in crime, was leading the group as they worked to design a computer-generated pie chart. They thought that was appropo...a pie chart for a dessert study..hahah. Another group was taking our robot, Franklin, apart so we could replace his batteries. Amazingly, one of my students could do it by removing one, yes, only one piece! Remarkable. Another smaller group, 1st and 5th grade girls (how sweet was that to see - big and little working together), was editing our AMPed website by writing about what they had learned about the Fibonacci Sequence (bet you don't know what that is...but they do :). Things settled there, I walked down the hall to check on one of my high school tutors who was discussing quartiles with his grade 4 group of 6 happy students. They had colored M&Ms layed out on the table (tutor's idea!). Further down the hall was another tutor with her group of 4 second graders. They were all engaged in drawing a line graph on the board that depicted the number of times they could jump in 1 minute. At 3:45 I hopped in the car and drove over to another school where two high school tutors were teaching algebra to a group of 8 some-what confused 4th graders. Instead of "I'm bored in math" I now hear, all the time, "Wow, this is hard!". It is so exciting to see how the AMped program has grown!