Math Competitions
You may notice that there are A LOT of materials supporting math competitions in our program.
  • Competition materials for a second weekly session after lesson #9 for 5th and 6th graders and EVERY 7th grade lesson.
  • Free week competitions every 4th week if you desire to use them. The free weeks are designed to give the students a break, but if you want to use these weeks for learning, competition materials are provided.
This is because we have learned, over the years, that kids LOVE to compete! Form them into teams and let them loose on problem sets that are within their capabilities and they dive into them with enthusiasm. We have even had kids skip the lesson day and show up for the competition day! These competitions reinforce the concepts they have learned. Also, interaction within teams tends to reinforce learning also. They learn from each other, not from just you, the coach!
  • Weekly competition materials
    1. Practice problem sets organized by subject and difficulty level
    2. More challenging problem sets from previous Washington State Math Olympiads.
      These problems come with hints that make them somewhat easier by putting the student on the correct path to solution:
  • Other competition materials
    • Problem Solving competitions:
      An extensive list of problem solving problems are provided. These are also graded for difficulty. These are real-world problems that students investigate as a team. The students must examine alternative approaches, select a strategy and use mathematical reasoning to formulate a solution. They are also required to communicate their findings with words, diagrams, charts and tables.
    • Math Jeopardy!
      These are a set of fun competitions adapted from the TV game show.
      Competitions are provided for 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grades at 3 levels of difficulty.
      You need a laptop computer and a big screen TV for this competition.
  • Multi-school competitions
    In addition to these materials provided for a weekly competition, we also provide instructions for how to set up your own multi-school competition. We did this in the Highline School District over a 5 year period. We only had a couple of schools participate in the first contest, but after that, other schools heard about it and wanted to join in! We had as many as 8 schools participating later. Schools (and teachers) are motivated to include activities that promote learning, especially when all the 'leg work' is done by other people (you!).
We feel the inclusion of competitions in your program helps reinforce the concepts learned in a way that is fun for the students (and pretty easy for the coach!).