Subject Spotlight: Lower School Math Lab
By Dylan Howlett
5-minute read
At 7:37 a.m., before the day has officially begun at Durham Academy Lower School, a second grader ambles into a second-floor classroom known as the Math Lab. She pauses at a signup sheet just inside the doorway. Her eyes bulge. The previous day’s list for “Open Math Lab” — the voluntary 20-minute period for any Lower Schoolers interested in choice-filled math games before school starts — stretches 22 names long. It is an attendance record. The second grader, Eleanor, is the first to arrive on this Wednesday morning. “Oh. My. GOSH!” she says upon seeing yesterday’s signup sheet. Open Math Lab will make anyone a believer in the power of arithmetic.
Abby Allred, the fourth grade teaching assistant who facilitates Open Math Lab, has a familiar question for Eleanor: “What do you want to play?” Allred knows the answer. Eleanor is a devotee of “SET,” a concentration-style card game that requires players to find patterns of three — according to color, symbol, number or shading — within a grid of 12. She distributes the cards atop a table toward the front of the room as Allred sits across from her. Theodore and Zoe soon join. “See if there’s a 1-2-3,” Allred says. Eleanor furrows her brow. “SET!” she cries.
It is the sort of mathematical exclamation that Emily Pyron, the Lower School math specialist who runs the Math Lab, delights in hearing. That’s what she and Carolyn Ronco envisioned when they created Open Math Lab at the beginning of the 2025–2026 school year as another structured environment for early-arriving students. “We’ve been really focusing on trying to find math enrichment for kids who really are excelling in math,” Pyron said. “The byproduct of that is kids who don’t always feel like they’re excelling also come to Math Lab.”
Pyron approaches Eleanor. “Can you explain to Zoe why it’s a set?” she asks. Eleanor points to the cards: The selected rhombus, oval and squiggle, she says, are all shaded, but they also sequentially form a “1-2-3” set — with one rhombus, two ovals and three squiggles. Eleanor soon identifies another 1-2-3 set, this time with squiggles that sport a striped pattern.
The trio at the SET table isn’t alone for long. Within 10 minutes, the day’s cohort has ballooned to 19 students. Seven girls animatedly gather at a back table to play a variant of “Multiplication War,” in which each student draws two cards and, after multiplying the two resulting numbers, hope to hold the largest product. A handful of students kneel on the carpet in the near corner of the room and clip together Polydron tiles — comprising squares, pentagons and triangles — to build small structures of their own design.
Time flies — exponentially, perhaps — when you’re having fun at Open Math Lab. The girls at the back table hurriedly deal cards to squeeze in one more round of Multiplication War. “I have 30!” one student shouts. “They have 36!” another shouts, pointing to a team of two. “They win!”
The clock strikes 7:50. It’s time to head to class.
“Thank you so much for coming and playing with us,” Allred says, and the 19 students file out of their classroom with broad smiles on their faces, wearing an expression of choice, and joy, and finding success in math.
That is, of course, the objective of Math Lab. And the day has just begun.
7:55 a.m. | Second Grade Teaching Assistant Curriculum Meeting
A few minutes after Open Math Lab concludes, the Lower School’s second grade teaching assistants — Isabel Gutierrez ’17, Angie Kincade, Jessica Walton and Molly Ward — gather in the Math Lab with Pyron, who leads a curriculum meeting for the grade level’s slate of December lessons. It’s also a chance to reflect on how things are going in November. And so they take some time to talk about time.
The second grade curriculum recently introduced 15-minute increments to their emergent time-telling students. It has been, the TAs report, an understandable and perfectly normal challenge — from miscounting increments to conflating the minute and hour hands. Pyron nods empathetically. She says she has started sprinkling in different increments with her first graders in hopes of deepening their contextual understanding for second grade.
Together they turn their attention to December, and its focus on patterns. The unit carries with it the characteristic rigor of Bridges — the math curriculum used in kindergarten to fourth grade, which pairs direct instruction with structured investigations and explorations. The TAs adopt the role of students: They scour a calendar grid filled with different colors and shapes as they attempt to anticipate which patterns students will identify, or misidentify. “That’s part of math,” Pyron says to the group. “Making a hypothesis that is wrong.” Their answer key reveals a panoply of potential answers. The group shares a concern from previous lessons. Some students see patterns everywhere, with no shortage of optimism, and it can prove difficult to redirect them toward actual patterns.
Pyron suggests the TAs tell students there are two kinds of patterns: repeating, such as triangle-circle-triangle-circle, and growing, such as 1-2-3-4. It is not imperative, she and the TAs agree, that the students identify each pattern correctly on their first try, nor should they stop searching altogether. “I like that they’re continuing to look,” Pyron says, “even if the patterns aren’t there.”
It’s a surefire sign, the group agrees, of a mathematical mind at work.
9:05 a.m. | Second Grade Whole Group Instruction
As the Hinton Heroes second grade class gathers on the Math Lab carpet, they learn that they’re no longer merely Lower Schoolers: They’re global logistics experts and toy store operators, too.
Pyron projects for her students the summary of a “Concept Quest,” an investigation set forth by Bridges. “It is something to do that is fun,” she tells the students, “and it’s a connection to math.”
Her framing for students is, by design, scant. “I’m going to read it,” she says, “and then you’re going to work on it.”
A local toy store has ordered 234 spinners from a company. The spinners can be shipped to the toy store in boxes of 100, bundles of 10 or in single packets.
Find five different ways the company could ship the spinners to the toy store. For each way, figure out how many boxes, bundles and single packets are needed.
The investigation fits, in many ways, the very creed of Math Lab, which shifts the cognitive burden of mathematical reasoning to students and helps them understand there’s more than one way to solve a problem. “We’re not asking our kids, ‘What’s 5+4?’” Pyron says. “We’re asking them, ‘How many different ways can you make 9?’”
In this case, the Heroes are tasked with making 234. A “box” represents 100 spinners, a “bundle” 10, and a “packet” 1. Each table around the room has a tray of blood-orange and blue manipulatives — some in individual cubes, several in attached columns of 10 and others in fixed 10x10 grids. Use the manipulatives, Pyron advises them. Talk to each other. Make sense together.
As they head to their tables, the Heroes fill the room with proclamations of mathematical confidence. I already know the first one! I figured out an answer! Pyron smiles. “If you found one,” she says over the din, “see if you can find another.” The majority of the class quickly discovers the most straightforward configuration: two boxes (200), three bundles (30) and four packets (4). Their early success buoys them in their quest — or Concept Quest — for more solutions.
“We need two more 10s!” a student tells their partner. A girl at another table examines her manipulatives. “Let’s think about what we have so far,” she says to her partner. Gutierrez circulates the room along with Pyron and challenges a duo of boys: “Is there a way you can make 100 with bundles?” she asks them. One of the boys frowns. He stares agape at Gutierrez. “Twenty bundles and 34 packets!” he cries.
About 10 minutes later, Pyron interrupts the flurry of manipulative-configuring and mathematical reasoning with the sound of a chime. “I want some of us to share your thinking,” she says. The Heroes gather at the rug in the front corner of the room and find a classmate other than their math partner to compare their answers. The room is abuzz once more. Students point to their diagrams. They show off their solutions. They learn from each other.
It’s the type of magic that multiplies in Math Lab.