Free Shakespeare for Fun and Copywork


Photo by Arbron.

This week only, [When I checked the link in April 2011, this was still free!] CurrClick (which carries the Math Mammoth workbook series) is offering Quotations from Shakespeare’s Plays as a free download. This ebook offers copywork tips from Charlotte Mason and about 30 pages of passages from Macbeth, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, etc.

And if you are planning a study of the Bard, you won’t want to miss the following always-free Internet resources.

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Quotes XXI: How Is Logic Like Whiskey?


Photo by Brian – Progressive Spin.

Logic is the science of making valid deductions and proofs — and it is also a fruitful topic for blackboard quotes. Here are a few of my favorites:

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Orthodox

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Checking for Old, Rusty Links


Photo by Clearly Ambiguous.

If you blog about MathCounts, beware that they recently overhauled their website — which made almost everyone’s links to them obsolete. I ran a routine check for dead links and found quite a few on my blog. I hope that I’ve caught most of them, but if you stumble across one of those nasty “Page not found” messages when you click a link on my blog, I hope you will report it in the comments section.

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Game: Avoid Three, or Tic-Tac-No!

Math concepts: slope, logical strategy
Number of players: 2 or more
Equipment: 4×4 or larger grid, pebbles or other tokens to mark squares

Set Up

Alexandria Jones and her brother Leon played Avoid Three with pebbles on a grid scratched in the sand, but you can also use pencils or markers on graph paper. You need a rectangular playing area at least 4×4 squares large. The bigger your grid, the longer your game.

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Substitute Teacher Experiments with Combinatorics


Photo by peigianlong.

Here is a puzzle from Just a Substitute Teacher:

Lesson plan entry: “Hand out worksheet packets and have students staple before starting. They know what to do.”

Sounds simple enough! Four numbered sheets, eight total pages, printed front and back. What could go wrong?

Do you know how many possible combinations four pieces of paper can be arranged for stapling?

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Answers to Leon’s Figurate Number Puzzles

Alexandria JonesRemember the Math Adventurer’s Rule: Figure it out for yourself! Whenever I give a problem in an Alexandria Jones story, I will try to post the answer soon afterward. But don’t peek! If I tell you the answer, you miss out on the fun of solving the puzzle. So if you haven’t worked these problems yet, go back to the original post. Figure them out for yourself — and then check the answers just to prove that you got them right.

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Puzzle: Figuring Out Figurate Numbers


Photo by frumbert.

Alexandria Jones‘s parents decided that the family needed to relax after the excitement of tracking Simon Skulk, so they spent the next day at a beach on the Mediterranean coast. Leon collected pebbles and tried to build up figurate numbers — numbers that make a figure, or shape — the way Dr. Theano had shown them.

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The Puzzling Pythagorean Pebbles

Feature photo above by meichimite (CC BY 2.0).

Alexandria Jones and her family flew to Italy for spring break. Her father, the famous archaeologist, had to visit an excavation.

It was late when their plane landed in Crotone, a small coastal city near the instep of Italy’s boot. Dr. Jones had used the Internet to find a hotel that allowed pets, so Alex was able to snuggle down with her favorite pillow — her trusty dog, Ramus.

The Original School of Mathematics

The next day, Dr. Jones introduced his family to Sonya Theano, a former student of his and the director of this dig. “Come, let me show you around,” Dr. Theano said. “We’ve uncovered several buildings of a small compound, set apart from the city of Crotona, as it was called then. From the pottery and trade goods, we estimate these buildings were in use around 550-500 BCE.”

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Math Games by Kids

Photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.

The cold came back and knocked me flat, but there are compensations. The downtime gave me a chance to browse my overflowing bookmarks folder, and I found something to add to my resource page. Princess Kitten and I enjoyed exploring these games and quizzes from Ambleweb.

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