Minim Day 2026 Recap - Part 2

Dear Minim Family,

Happy weekend!
It is the month of tsuyu (rainy season) and the beautiful ajisai flowers are in full bloom. If you are looking for ideas of what to do this month, we prepared a list of activities to keep your family occupied and enriched this rainy season!

Back to the newsletter. It warms our heart every time we look back on Minim Day. So many memories were made that we had to split it to 2 parts!

Last week, we wrote about highlights of the Minim Ukulele Picnic,
This week, it brings us much joy to write about the highlights from the Minim Math Race!

Why we did it

This was our first year setting up the Minim Math race, and it was a huge effort from everyone on the Minim Math Team.

With the trust and support of the community, Minim launched the Math Academy to bring caring and effective math enrichment to children. While doing well academically is important to us, we must remind ourselves never to forget that learning is a journey, and this journey is a fun and memorable experience.

The Minim Math Race embodies the fun in learning, combining nature around us and math elements, and bringing in the whole family to experience it together.

Thank you for being part of it!

After registration, children received Minim Money in the form of tokens. The moment they realised "money" was involved, the excitement was real! Every booth offered a chance to win more tokens, which could later be exchanged for prizes.

We then explained how to play each booth and where to find them, since everyone was spread out across the park and had to listen carefully!

We also made it clear this was a family event: parents and guardians were there to guide their children through each math challenge, with the real goal being to have fun doing math together. Everyone got the message, and it was wonderful to see the community come together to make the Math Race a truly enriching experience for the children.

At one booth, families solved math puzzles using numbers and operators. We were pleasantly surprised to see that it was not just the children who were determined to crack them. Parents refused to leave the booth until the puzzle was solved!

Booth 2: Using shapes and angles, children went off to find shapes around the park and bring back a photo. The ideas they came up with were wonderfully creative!

There was also a measuring booth where children estimated the height of objects. Building towers out of bottles and using a measuring tape to check their guesses turned out to be a lot of fun!

We had a math relay with food-related questions, and everyone still had a full battery and a challenge mindset. With easy, medium, and hard level questions on offer, we adults were pleasantly surprised that children wanted to pick "hard mode" from the very first try! Even when a question was beyond what some of them could fully solve, you could see they were having fun and were always up for the challenge. They see math as a game, and they were ready to face it head-on. That is the spirit!

In our final booth, children had to gather items from the park that matched a target weight of 300g. Everyone was given a weighing scale and a net to take on the challenge, and they quickly spread out to find materials around the park, and sometimes on themselves, to make the scale balance!

The fun did not stop there. We also had a "Guess the Popcorn" station, with one jar of caramel and one of salted popcorn. The winner of each got to take the whole jar home! There were some excellent guesses from the community.

With all the tokens collected throughout the day, it was finally time to exchange them for prizes. The children had a wonderful time figuring out the "price" of each prize and choosing the ones they wanted most. Everyone was a winner!

It takes a village <3

The Math Race was truly a tremendous effort from the community to make this happen, and we could not have done with without a passionate team of teachers and staff, support from sponsors and contributors, and nurturing families coming together to help make this a math race to remember.

The smiling faces, the families working as a team, the determination of the children to solve challenges, the excitement of participating in the race... These memories will stay with us through the summer and beyond.

Thank you again to everyone, and wishing you a wonderful rest of the weekend. See you here next week!