Mathnasium of Crystal Lake's Top 5 Moments!

1. Our favorite “aha!” moment with a student.

A: Our Assistant Center Director Jake was working with one of our students, Sarah, on the Law of Sameness. She had previously learned the Law of Sameness in regards to adding fractions together. She tried to take 2x+7 and change it to 9x. Jake reminded her of the Law of Sameness and reiterated that you can't add things together unless they are the same type of thing. This made perfect sense to Sarah and she was able to do the rest of the Algebra problems without a sweat.

2. A time when a student earned a reward.

A: Sarah has been attending Mathnasium for 5 years now. When she started, she was working on addition and subtraction, and now she is working on higher up Algebra concepts. Throughout the entire time that Sarah had attended Mathnasium, she did not spend a single rewards card, netting her up to over 400 cards. So since she had so many cards, we were able to buy a PS4 for her to use (which came in handy since her PS3 has just broken.) Sarah worked extremely hard for years to earn that, and we are very proud of her.

3. Positive parent experience.

A: Jake has been working with tutoring 2 brothers for a couple years now. Recently, their dad came into their center for the first time and thanked Jake for working with them this whole time, and said he was a life saver, that he is very thankful they started coming to us.

4. Favorite ways to teach concepts.

A: An example of one of our favorite ways to teach concepts is playing integer war. Each player has a half of the deck of cards and in each turn, a player flips two cards. Black cards represent positive numbers while red cards represent negative numbers. Then, the two students find the sum of each set of cards to determine who wins the cards for this round. Making it a game, intrinsically makes the learning process more fun for the kids, as well as the repetition of having to do 2 integer problems each round of the game, cements in the concept quicker than if they were just solving problems on the page. To help them with the actual math of this, I state that negative numbers and positive numbers are at war with each other. If they are paired with someone on their side of the war, they will join forces, but if they are on opposite sides, they will battle and only the difference between them will remain.

5. A time when a student scored well on a test.

A: A couple years ago, we had a student come in for SAT prep. He was so advanced in math that he was trying to take the SAT as a freshman in high school. We worked with him for countless hours on a large amount of Mathnasium and SAT prep content and were able to help him get the score he was aiming for. After that, since he was so advanced in math, he ended up becoming an instructor here at the Mathnasium of Crystal Lake.