Check out the new playful math blog carnival at Math Misery? blog. Manan Shah put together a great collection of number puzzles along with some math games, teaching tips, and more:
Oops! I can’t believe I forgot to post these links when my latest book came out way back in March. Indie author fail…
Do you want your children to enjoy learning math?
Teach them how to play!
In excerpts from five of my most popular books, the Let’s Play Math Sampler features ten kid-tested games covering math concepts from counting to prealgebra.
Yes, your kids CAN learn to love math. Keep your children’s math skills fresh with my 8-week email series of math games and activities.
No purchase necessary! Just sign up for my email newsletter, and every week for the next two months you’ll automatically receive one of my favorite math club activities or an excerpt from my series of math game books.
And I’ll send you occasional news updates with playful math tips, resource links, and book sales or other promotions.
Did you know that numbers can be polite? In math, a polite number is any number we can write as the sum of two or more consecutive positive whole numbers.
(Consecutive means numbers that come one right after another in the counting sequence.)
For example, five is a polite number, because we can write it as the sum of two consecutive numbers:
5 = 2 + 3
Nine is a doubly polite number, because we can write it two ways:
9 = 4 + 5
9 = 2 + 3 + 4
And fifteen is an amazingly polite number. We can write fifteen as the sum of consecutive numbers in three ways:
15 = 7 + 8
15 = 4 + 5 + 6
15 = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5
How many other polite numbers can you find?
You can build polite numbers (like fifteen) with a staircase of blocks.
What Do You Notice?
Are all numbers polite?
Or can you find an impolite number?
Can you make a collection of polite and impolite numbers? Find as many as you can.
How many different ways can you write each polite number as a sum of consecutive numbers?
What do you notice about your collection of polite and impolite numbers?
Can you think of a way to organize your collection so you can look for patterns?
What Do You Wonder?
Make a conjecture about polite or impolite numbers. A conjecture is a statement that you think might be true.
For example, you might make a conjecture that “All odd numbers are…” — How would you finish that sentence?
Make another conjecture.
And another.
Can you make at least five conjectures about polite and impolite numbers?
What is your favorite conjecture? Does thinking about it make you wonder about numbers?
Can you think of any way to test your conjectures, to know whether they will always be true or not?
Real Life Math Is Social
This is how mathematics works. Mathematicians play with numbers, shapes, or ideas and explore how those relate to other ideas.
After collecting a set of interesting things, they think about ways to organize them, so they can look for patterns and connections. They make conjectures and try to imagine ways to test them.
And mathematicians compare their ideas with each other. In real life, math is a very social game.
So play with polite and impolite numbers. Compare your conjectures with a friend.
Check out the new playful math blog carnival at Math Misery? blog. Manan Shah put together a great collection of number puzzles along with some math games, teaching tips, and more: 
Yes, your kids CAN learn to love math. Keep your children’s math skills fresh with my 8-week email series of math games and activities.
Are all numbers polite? 
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 