Feature photo (above) by L. Marie. Math comic by davidd. Both via flickr (CC BY 2.0).
Hooray for September 25th — it’s Math Storytelling Day!
Celebrate Math Storytelling Day by making up and sharing math stories. Everyone loves a story, so this is a great way to motivate your children to play around with math. What might a math story involve? Patterns, logic, history, puzzles, relationships, fictional characters, … and yes, even numbers.
For inspiration, visit:
- The original Math Storytelling Day post
- Math Storytelling Day at Math Mama Writes
- Stories about The Idea of Counting at Cut the Knot
- Maria’s story about Apple Math Snacks
Have you and your children created any math stories? We’d love to hear! Please share your links in the comments section below.
Storytelling Activities
Over the years, my own children and my Math Club kids have enjoyed a wide variety of mathematical stories. We may even have done some of them on Storytelling Day, though I wasn’t keeping track.
For instance, once upon a time we:
- Played a story-telling game
- Imagined the secret life of numbers
- Explored historical mathematics
- Made up word problems from literature
- Revisited the story problem challenge
- Read a wide variety of living math books
- Created a fictional math adventure saga
- Wrote about a math lesson that turned into an experiment
- And shared the story of solving a tough math problem
Don’t Forget the Snacks
Even when it’s fun, math is hard mental work. Make sure your children’s brains have plenty of fuel with these official Math Storytelling Day snacks:
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 
I hope you don’t consider this spam, but I have self-published an entire 32-page comic book with heroes who have math-based powers. In their very first adventure, they have to solve a prime number puzzle to escape a villain’s trap. It’s called Solution Squad, and it’s easily searchable.
It looks like a fun story, Jim!
I added a link to your comment, in case others want to check it out. I’ve been trying to get to your Facebook page, but FB seems to be temporarily broken. 😦
Thanks for all you do in the field of math! I have also created a series of children’s rhyming books that introduce place value, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division using characters. It’s called Arithmetic Village. I love that there are many people who are committed to ensure math is assessable to all types of learners. 🙂
Hi, Kimberly! Thanks for dropping by. I definitely enjoy your story and all the activities on your website (although I find the new site, with its frames, much harder to navigate than the old one). Which reminds me that I should go update the links in my Arithmetic Village review…
Thanks, Denise. Math Storytelling Day is a great birthday present for me. (One of my students wrote me a math story!)
What fun, Sue! Are you going to post the story?
If I find time, I will!