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Fun multiplies with Math Princess
By PAULETTE LASH RITCHIE
© St. Petersburg Times, HERNANDO -- Two tiny, blond prekindergarten girls looked up in awe at the strange lady in the tiara and bold pink boa who was waving a "magical," musical, green, star-tipped wand over their heads. Title I math resource teacher Elaine Bamford, also known as, the Math Princess, bent down to the children to count them. "We have one, two girls," she said. The little ones were mesmerized. The Math Princess is at Hernando Elementary School three days a week to work with third- to fifth-grade students, and later in the year with the younger students, on math. A theme, Bamford said, gets the kids interested and excited. "The crazier you are, the more they pay attention," she said. And so at school she wears her tiara, a hot pink boa, white gloves with purple feather trim, a fan trimmed with pink feathers (feathers are a big part of the ensemble; sometimes one drops as she walks down the hall and a lucky child can find it), and a sash, held closed by a diamond M-A-T-H pin, which proclaims she is the Math Princess. The school has rallied around her idea and royalty has become the schoolwide theme for the school year. She said the school jumped right on the band wagon. The Friday before school started Les Snyder, a maintenance worker for the Citrus County School District, well-known for his art work, painted a mural on the corridor wall of a book opening with a castle emerging from it, along with "Hernandoland -- An Enchanting Community of Learners." "Everything's royal this year," Bamford said, "we've just begun and it's just going to mushroom." On the math wall, a math lesson site visible to the entire school, the students will be graphing their progress with Accelerated Reader points. (Accelerated Reader is a computerized program designed to encourage reading by providing instant reinforcement on computers.) There is a big, bare paper castle on the wall and the children will be adding stones to it as they gather AR points, 10 points for a stone. Hopefully they will have completely covered the castle by the end of the year. The children who haven't met her personally were introduced to the Math Princess on the Morning Show filmed in the Royal Tech Lab. Every week on that show there is a problem of the week for the children to mull over and try to solve. The school estimates monthly in the cafeteria. Royal jars are filled with items for the children to estimate and students with the closest numbers are announced on the Morning Show. Bamford works closely with the Title I reading teachers, Laura Ubinas, Theresa Manning, Margaret Turner and Kathy Belmont. "If they can't read, they can't do the math," said Bamford, "so we work together on both skills." The children practice writing by keeping math journals, she said. Royal principal Carol Mainor understands the value of a schoolwide, fun theme. "Underneath all of this is constant problem-solving and how math is integrated in the world," she said. Bamford attracts a lot of attention with her tiara and wand, but she rarely misses an opportunity to use those encounters to teach a bit of math. She knows she has the children's attention when, at the end of the day as they are headed home, they look out the bus window and say, "Good-by, Math Princess."
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