Thanksgiving Day Parade comes early at Rex Fortune Elementary School

Inspired by the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Rex Fortune Elementary School let fourth- through sixth-grade students express their creativity and learn math and robotics in their Robot Parade last Friday. Rex Fortune is a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) school that held its grand opening in July and opened its doors to students in August, according to a previous Gold Mountain News article. "Me and my partner Ms. Toft and our principal, Mr. Farrell, the three of us put this idea together," fifth-grade teacher Hayley Kinney said. Kinney and fourth-grade teacher Kayla Toft's concept for a parade was inspired by the book "Balloons over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy's Parade." They brainstormed hosting a parade, then worked together to connect math and coding concepts to the idea. "We figured we should be trying to build that engagement and love for math as best we can," Kinney said. "So, we decided to use our robots, where the kids would have to do lots of different math concepts in order to code their robot and make their robot to make a little parade out of it." Concepts students learned included measuring distances, multiplication, geometry with right angles and many more math concepts. Many were concepts students were already taught, thus they "put it into action" through the parade, Kinney said. According to Kinney, she and Toft showed their classes old footage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, then let the students put on their own twist by choosing their favorite pop culture characters. Students in fourth and fifth grades decorated their robots on wheels to be miniature parade floats with some of their favorite characters, including Spider-Man, Hello Kitty, Cocomelon, Pokémon and more. Each robot rolled along a programmed path passing through a mockup of New York City created by the sixth graders, which included numerous skyscrapers and landmarks such as Chick-Fil-A, In-N-Out and Macy's. "We wanted to give the New York City vibe, and so we actually reached out to our sixth-grade teacher because we knew in math, they learn about volume," Kinney said. "So she and her class created our buildings using a volume formula." Kinney and Toft were excited to not only let their students learn but shared the excitement with other classes, who came by to view the parade. Not only was the parade educational, it was also fun for the students, parents and teachers. Kinney said it was especially "cool" to see students "who are not super strong in math to have something to be excited about and to be engaged about, and so this has been a really great experience for trying to change that negative view towards math."