Students assembling activity bags
Parents and Kids Counting A-Lot Together (PAKCAT) is a program designed to provide mathematics materials to children and their families so they can work on together to promote quantitative literacy.
The District 742 Local Education & Activities Foundation (LEAF) earned a $23,000 grant from the Morgan Family Foundation to launch a pilot program for pre-school students last school year that was coordinated by St. Cloud State faculty.
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PAKCAT is a companion program to Parents and Kids Reading A-Lot Together (PAKRAT), which loans out books to kids in pre-school through third grade through the St. Cloud School district. Kids check out the books during the school year through their classrooms and from the PAKRAT bus that travels throughout the district during the summertime. The goal of the program is to get children and their parents reading together outside of school. PAKRAT started in 2011, said Bruce Hentges, LEAF executive director.
Adding mathematics activities as gives parents some instructions on how to work with their children on mathematics concepts. Both the children and parents get familiar with working together on math, and the children gain a feeling that math is fun, he said.
“Getting kids and parents comfortable with working on math together, we think in the long run will pay off for everybody,” Hentges said.
St. Cloud State Mathematics and Mathematics Education professor Dr. Melissa Hanzsek-Brill saw how successful the PAKRAT program had been and recommended the district add a program to promote mathematics literacy.
A Harvard study on educational outcomes in young children found that parents and children don’t see mathematics as existing outside the classroom, while reading is seen as something one does in everyday life. Bringing PAKCAT activities into the home allows families to see how mathematics can be a part of daily existence Hanzsek-Brill said.
“Melissa is the expert and the passion behind the PACKAT program,” Hentges said. “It’s a great example of working together by St. Cloud State and District 742.”
Once LEAF secured funding Hanzsek-Brill and early education professor Dr. Ming-Chi Own worked with early childhood education teachers within the district to identify the skills that needed to be addressed through the activities.
St. Cloud State Future Educators Club members assisted in assembling bags of mathematics activities and instructions for students to check out each week.
When COVID-19 closed down schools in March, LEAF sought funding to support a summer version of PAKRAT and PACKAT. Thanks to a $5,000 grant from the Central Minnesota Community Foundation COVID-19 Response Fund and another $5,000 grant from Stearns Bank, LEAF was able to purchase both reading and mathematics materials to distribute to children to keep. The PAKRAT bus began making its rounds around District 742 in mid-July and 600 math activity bags were handed out in the course of three days.
St. Cloud State faculty and students again helped designed and put together age-appropriate math bags for the children to take home, which included instructional videos on how to play each game included in the bag. A local St. Cloud youth organization, the Young People’s Collective, volunteered their time to assemble all of the math bags as part of their commitment to the community.
The PAKCAT and PAKRAT materials are especially needed this summer to help prevent the summer slide in loss of reading and mathematics abilities and skills. A Brookings Institute study projects that children will return to school in Fall 2020 with only 35-50% of the learning gains in mathematics from the previous year, well down from the usual 70-75% return.
With the disruptions of spring, and the uncertainty surrounding the return in fall, this intervention will help kids maintain their skills and stay on track, Hentges said.
