At Academy360 Upper School’s Young Adult Program, mathematics teacher Lindsey Releford has a knack for making math fun for her students – even at a distance!

In her “Math Concepts for the Real World,” Lindsey goes the extra length to make learning money skills memorable and entertaining. One example? For a recent class Lindsey dressed up as Alex Trebek for a “Jeopardy! Money Skills Review Game.”

In Lindsey’s words:

Each day we have an instructional-connected theme for my remote-learning YAP Math classes that myself, teaching assistant Laura Merkel, my staff, and the students “dress up” for and also have a “Dance/Brain Break” with music that is connected to the lesson.

Recently I had a student wearing a polyester shirt, multiple gold chains, and an afro for our planned math activities that revolved around traveling back to the 1970s. I try to include some fun and laughter to each of my sessions and I am not afraid to make a fool out of myself!

We’ve had many different themes and activities: for “Shopping at the Grocery Store” I embedded the Oscar Mayer Wiener song/YouTube video to a package of Oscar Mayer hot dogs, embedded the Oscar Mayer B-O-L-O-G-N-A commercial to a package of Oscar Mayer bologna, and I danced around to a silly song about beans with a giant can of beans for our “Brain/Dance Break.”

For another class I advised the students and parents to wear their western gear for our lesson about totaling a shopping list at Target. We “shopped” for items to wear to go country line dancing and then we took our “Dance/Brain Break” and line danced to “Cotton Eye Joe.” It was so awesome to see my students wearing their cowboy hats and western gear while dancing around. Some of my students even knew the specific line dancing steps to this song! My students and their families really enjoy getting into our daily, silly themes!

Lindsey incorporates JibJab videos into these “Dance/Brain Break” sessions. JibJab is an eCard website where you “cast” friends and family, adding their photos to animated music videos that can be emailed or posted to social media.

Dr. Danielle Taylor, Assistant Director for Spectrum360 virtually “dropped in” recently on one of Lindsey’s math classes. In honor of her visit, Lindsey cast her and several students into a very special video!

Lindsey says: “I know that my students and staff will enjoy seeing her in our Google Meet Session and on this activity. I create these JibJab activities for each of my classes every day and rotate the students and staff through them. My students and staff really enjoy it!”