FACILITATOR’S GUIDE:
A STEP BY STEP PROCESS HOW
TO INCLUDE
MIGRANT FAMILIES
IN YOUR MATH FAMILY NIGHTS
STEPS FOR PLANNING YOUR MIGRANT FAMILY MATH NIGHTS
1. At the beginning of the school year, the principal, PAC members and teachers who will be
participating in Family Math Nights need to meet and set dates. These dates should be put on the
school calendar immediately and sent home to the parents. This will also make it easier for everyone
involved with planning other activities at your school to know dates that are already reserved.
How to intentionally include migrant families:
 Consider having your math night at other community locations, consider
transportation
 Consider including migrant families in your already established math family
nights with accommodations for the cultural and linguistic needs of the families
 Possibly meet with the migrant families before the all-school event to scaffold the
activities first, and then have them join whole group
 Possibly meet with the migrant families after math night to go over concepts in
their home language
 Plan to have interpretation and/or bilingual staff available
 Talk to migrant home visitors about extending a personal invitation to the migrant
families
 Budget: Can staff be paid for attending? Is this in your i-grant budget or can you
make a budget revision to include it?
 Include your Migrant Parent Advisory Council members in planning and
implementation of math night
2. Six weeks before the actual date of Family Math Night, the teachers involved should meet. They
should decide how their family night would be organized. The remaining suggestions will act as if
the organization method decided upon is parents and students rotating through various math stations.
Each math station could represent a math standard. If a large crowd is expected, extra stations could
be used such as calculator math, technology and math, and/or two stations could be developed for
one standard.
 Remember that many families have younger siblings and may need stations for children
under the age of 5
Other decisions to be made are what will the math stations contain, who will be responsible for making
activities for each station, and what committees need to be formed.
 Ensure that at each station there are strategies for including family participation and someone
who is able to communicate effectively with the families involved. Many of our migrant
families use their children to interpret. This is not an effective strategy and does not meet the
needs of the families. If possible, have bilingual staff or PAC members run each of the
stations.
A suggestion would be to have each teacher take a standard and be responsible for developing
his/her own hands-on fun, engaging math activity for a math station.
 Be sure that they are utilizing activities that can be practiced at home with little to no cost.
Many of the families, especially migrant families, have limited access to math resources.
Setting up a math lending library is a great idea and also part of the Migrant Education
Program Service Delivery Plan.
TIME AND DATE:
Another important decision is the time.
How to intentionally include migrant families:
 To ensure participation from migrant families, schedule the event at an appropriate time for
families and try to make sure that there are no other community events that are planned for
that time. Also, an appropriate time of day is essential. In order to determine whether it is a
good time of day, ask the parents themselves. Often, parents are working late in the fields
and cannot come until around 7 pm. The PAC members can be utilized as well for planning
purposes.
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Provide plenty of time for registration and people who can help bilingual families with
registration in Spanish. Also, the people in charge of registration should be warm and
inviting. For many migrant families, schools are not a familiar place. Some migrant families
don’t have much experience with the school system, and therefore feel intimidated by it. The
people who are in charge of registrations should be bilingual, culturally aware, and familiar
with the migrant families as much as possible.
Warning: If your scheduled time is from 6:00 to 8:00 and you have allowed no time for
registration, you really will not get started until around 6:30 because it will take a half hour to
register about 50 to 60 people.
All Teachers at a Math Station: Begin to look at ideas for the math activity at your math station.
Make sure it is linked to your standard. Choose activities that are hands-on, engaging , and fun. Also
make sure you have plenty of manipulatives for all the parents and students that attend. One
suggestion would be to also label your table in a way that can be easily seen. Each teacher could cut
a pennant out of cardstock and label it with the related math standard. Tape the pennant to a
yardstick, and stick it in a plastic bucket or flowerpot. That way, all participants can easily see it.
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Make sure that all signage used displays all the languages represented by your families. Also
include contextual clues for families with low-literacy.
Have standards available in multiples languages including “kid friendly” language. This will
allow family members and students who have not acquired academic language to understand
what is expected of them.
Make sure that activities are culturally appropriate.
Ensure that activities require little preparation, low cost and easily attainable materials.
If materials used are not already regularly found in the home (including migrant homes), be sure
the materials are available through the district lending library.
The suggested committees and their responsibilities are as follows:
3. COMMITTEES
A. ADVERTISEMENT COMMITTEE: Flyers should be designed and sent out to parents for the
first time at least two weeks ahead of time. Press Releases should be sent out one week before the
Family Math Night. The school marquee should have Family Math Night information in English
and Spanish put on it for a week before Family Math Night. Hang posters in the hall to remind
the students. Have it announced on the morning news. Have teachers talk it up! A pizza party or
ice cream social for the homeroom with the most attendees could also be an incentive. Teachers
could also offer incentives such as a free homework pass if the students attend. One week before,
send home a reminder letter. The day before, remind the students of the upcoming evening
events. On the day of Family Math Night, remind students one more time! You could even
display the door prizes that day to help/encourage students to remember.
The migrant community is a relationship-based community. It is essential that your advertising
committee include staff who have a positive rapport with the migrant families and will have
personal contact with them as part of your promotional activities. Some ideas for advertising are:
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Make phone calls to parents
Have incentives for attendance (premios, or door prizes)
Post flyers in community agencies such as literacy councils, Head Start, local laudromats,
grocery stores, taco trucks, etc.
All flyers should be in English and Spanish and should note that interpretation will be
provided at the event
Send flyers home with students in both English and Spanish
Utilize local radio stations
Utilize the PAC for a phone tree or word-of-mouth advertising
Set up extra credit for students who volunteer and/or attend
Have high school migrant students help run activities
May be able to give teachers “credit” for attending (hours paid or toward per diem days)
Have students present (which?)
Get students excited about Math night, they will encourage their parents to attend
Allow for and encourage extended family to attend
B. PRIZE COMMITTEE: The first thing to be considered is do you want prizes, and if so, where?
Do you want them at each station? You do not have to have prizes. However, if you decide to
have prizes, they could be given away as door prizes.
 Another idea rather than prizes is to give away the necessary items for the games. Many
migrant families do not have the access to the tools necessary for making the games that
you have presented. This fulfills part of the Migrant Service Delivery Plan goal of
providing a math lending library.
 Math tools giveaways should be put together beforehand and distributed at the end of the
night. This should not be dependent on full participation of the family (i.e. a bingo prize
or when all stations are visited) but rather a means to meet the family where they are on
their math participation level.
 Talk with OSPI or your local MERO regarding the use of migrant funds for giveaways to
ensure that this is truly supplemental in nature.
Suggestions for math giveaways:
1. NUMBER SENSE: paper money, dominoes, deck of cards, Cuisenaire rods kit, 100 number
chart, base ten blocks, dice, color cubes, color counters, straws, tooth picks, clothes pins,
ruler, buttons, peanuts, empty egg cartons, spinner, game markers, index cards, scissors, glue,
post-its, tape measure, and number line, tile squares. You could also give parents information
about Using Virtual Manipulatives on the Web.
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Make sure this information is available in multiple languages or that the parents know
how to use a site like Google Translator to translate the page into the language
necessary for full participation.
2. COMPUTATION: index cards, blank adding machine tape, tooth picks, tongue depressors,
spinner, dice, ruler, number line, paper money, old sales magazines with items and prices or
sales flyers from newspapers, straws, beans, multiplication flash cards, addition flash cards,
division flash cards, subtraction flash cards, scissors, glue, color crayons, beads, nylon string,
Hit the Deck card game, 100 number chart, 25 number chart, multiplication chart, color tiles,
manipulative clock, abacus, fraction board, deck of cards, masking tape, construction paper,
and calendar.
3. ALGEBRA AND FUNCTIONS: Battleship Game, number line, paper money, graph paper,
package of M & M’s, 3 different kinds of beans, ruler, construction paper, scissors, colored
pencils, glue.
4. GEOMETRY: pizza board, geometric shapes, ruler, geometric magnet links, masking tape,
post-its, scissors, construction paper, tan grams, markers, poster board, old magazines, graph
paper, game markers, wallpaper scraps, index cards, ruler, yardstick, protractor, tiles or paper
squares.
5. MEASUREMENT: tape measurement, yardstick, ruler, meter stick, one-half meter stick,
string or ribbon, masking tape, index cards, paper money, blank roll of adding machine tape,
poster board, colored pencils, markers, different size lids, manipulative clocks, calendar,
stopwatch, measuring cups, measuring spoons, empty soft drink cans, toothpicks, drawing
paper, paper clips, empty containers of all sizes, sugar cubes, coat hangers to make balance
scale, thermometers, graph paper.
6. DATA ANALYSIS AND PROBABILITY: assorted buttons, markers, ruler, assorted candy,
assorted beans, empty roll of adding machine tape, graph paper, different colors of dice, deck
of cards, colored paper, scratch paper, index cards, pens, pencils, colored pencils, scissors,
glue, masking tape, cube-shaped blocks, spinners, ruler, paperclips, checkerboard, game
markers.
7. PROBLEM SOLVING: Sudoku puzzles, wooden puzzle shapes, Set Game (a card game
that can be bought or played on the internet at The Set Daily Puzzle), index cards, ruler,
yardstick, pens, paper, colored pencils, graph paper, colored paper squares, assortment of
buttons, old catalogs.
C.
REFRESHMENTS COMMITTEE: Some choices are to ask the PTA or PAC to provide the
refreshments. It might be just cookies and drinks or they might want to fix a full meal, depending on
funds and availablity. Many parents have wonderful resources for providing food to families. Though
providing food is not necessary, it is a nice touch for families that have come straight from work and
have not been able to feed their families beforehand. Popcorn, apples and cheese all make a nice snack
as well and can help tide families over if a meal is not planned.
D.
REGISTRATION COMMITTEE: One way of keeping track of the parents and students that
attend is to have a sign-in sheet for each station or for each math teacher. Parents and students can sign
the sheets as they arrive, or they can check in at a booth upon arrival for greeting, instructions and/or
registration.
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Each parent should receive a ticket with the number of stations on it. This can be a
passport-style paper that each family gets stamped when the activities at each station
are completed.
Be sure to note which families have active migrant COEs (Certificates of Eligibility)
as this is important fiscally and with pre- and post- surveys.
Have families fill out a pre-survey if that is what you are going to use to measure the
parents’ response regarding their feeling of confidence in their ability to support their
children’s math development at home (as per the Migrant Service Delivery Plan). This
can be done as a paper and pencil survey (see attached example) or as a sticker dot
chart where families mark with a colored dot to rate their confidence on a continuum.
Use one color for pre-event rating and another color for post-event feedback.
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Additional ideas:
 These tickets should be made ahead of time. On each ticket, circle one number. Then each
parent will start at the station circled. That is the way to keep your stations evenly populated.
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You can also have raffle tickets on the registration table for the students. That way you can use
those tickets for the door prizes from each math station that you give away at the end of the
night.
E.
SET-UP COMMITTEE: It’s suggested you have at least two people on this committee. This
committee will be responsible for setting up the gym (or wherever you decide to have your Migrant
Math Night) with tables for the math stations and chairs for the presenters and parents. In addition, a
table will be needed for registration. If the teachers are responsible for the refreshments, that
area will have to also be made ready.
F.
NOTEBOOKS FOR PARENTS COMMITTEE: First, you should decide if you would like to
give parents a notebook of recommended activities for their students’ grade levels. A notebook is a great
take-away for parents, but keep in mind the parents’ level of educaiton and experience when developing
these notebooks. The hands-on activities themselves are often much more useful for the families.
If you are interested in providing a notebook, here are some ideas of what to include:
1. Every Child Mathematically Proficient: Top Ten Tips for Parents-Learning First Alliance
available in a variety of lanaguages
2. Glossary for Specific Grade Level Terms (These can probably be found at the back of the student
textbook or in the Migrant Math Toolkit in both English and Spanish, including definitions.)
3. Grade Level State Standards written in easily understandable, kid-friendly lanugage such as that
found in the Migrant Math Toolkit in both English and Spanish.
4. After each standard, a list of activities that parents can do at home with their children.
5. Copies of charts particular to the students’ grade levels such as: hundreds chart, place value
chart, multiplication table, addition table, graph paper, etc.
6. Please also visit your local MERO website for updated and additional resources:
Yakima region- http://www.esd105.wednet.edu/educational-services/mero
Anacortes region- http://www.nwesd.org/15101061114271330/site/default.asp
Wenatchee region- http://www.ncesd.org/167310410151733120/site/default.asp
G.. EVALUATION COMMITTEE: You may want to make two different evaluation sheets, one for
the parents and another for the teachers that are involved in Math Night. Make the evaluation short and
specific. Do not ask for too many write-in answers. For parents you may want to use a simple chart
where parents place a dot on a spectrum, indicating how confident they feel with being able to support
their child in math in the home (as stated on the Migrant Service Delivery Plan goal). After gathering the
evaluation forms from the parents and the teachers, a report should be made and discussed with the
principal and teachers involved. This will give you information for planning your next Family Math
Night.
Please do not hesitate to contact your local Migrant Academic Service Coordinator at your MERO
MERO 105- Jim Beichler at (509) 454-2855 or Jim.Beichler@esd105.org
Don Bender at (509) 454-2856 or Donald.Bender@esd105.org
MERO 171 Kathy Thornock at (509) 665-2613 or Kathyt@ncesd.org
MERO 189 Kelly Pingree at 360-299-4053 or kpingree@nwesd.org
Information from this document was taken from
http://www.evscicats.com/edtech/communication/mathnight/