Pulaski Elementary receives $5,000 Lowe’s Toolbox for Education Grant

Pulaski Elementary has received a $5,000 Lowe’s Toolbox for Education grant for “Math and Movement Family and Community Involvement Project”

We are thrilled to announce that Lowe’s has awarded the Pulaski Elementary funding for the “Math and Movement Family and Community Involvement Project”. Our grant application was based on the goal of improving math skills for students while involving parents and the community. We look forward to sharing the Math and Movement Family and Community Involvement Project with the Town of Pulaski community. Our goal is to make our school and community as nurturing as possible in order to foster learning. Over the years we have discovered a gap in math skills and are funneling more resources to improve test scores

Rebecah Smith
Rebecah Smith, Principal

and meet our mission of an effective learning environment. Research shows instruction geared to different learning styles, particularly kinesthetic, allows students to learn better and retain more. By using this physical learning style and involving parents and the community in the learning process, we will succeed in our two-part mission. We believe implementing the Math & Movement (M&M) holistic math learning program will minimize our gap in knowledge and build community.

With the funds provided, our school will be able to host Math Family Fun Nights in which “Children use fun floor mats and wall charts to learn math and reading concepts through movement. The two-hour event boosts students’ confidence in math and reading skills … .” (mathandmovement.com) This event is hosted by Math and Movement which is a kinesthetic math program developed by Suzy Koontz, CEO of Math and Movement.  “Math & Movement is a kinesthetic, multi-sensory approach to teaching math and literacy that incorporates physical exercise, stretching, cross-body panthersmovements, yoga and visually pleasing floor mats designed to encourage students to practice concepts. Our program allows students to physically hop, walk, crawl, dance or touch the mats and banners as they learn, thus using more learning modalities (visual, auditory, motor, and kinesthetic) when practicing.” (mathandmovement.com)

In addition to hosting the family and community night events, we plan to use funds to purchase selected mats from Math and Movement that we can use on a regular basis at school with students.  This will help students to practice and improve basic math skills using movement which helps students to retain the learning. The program also provides mats for early literacy skills that we will use in the primary grades.

Implementing this project will raise test scores as well as increase the confidence and learning skills of Pulaski Elementary’s 540 students. By supporting different learning styles – visual, auditory and kinesthetic – student success will only increase. We are thrilled to find that M&M fits our students’ needs perfectly and will allow us better partnership with our community.

Our school and community will greatly benefit from this grant. We wish to thank our friends at Lowe’s for generously supporting this important project.

Submitted by Rebecah Smith, Principal

All K-12 public schools in the United States are eligible for the Toolbox for Education program.  More information is available at www.ToolboxforEducation.com.