Want to help your children learn math?
Teach them to play.
My new Let’s Play Math Sampler: 10 Family-Favorite Games for Learning Math Through Play contains short excerpts from my most popular titles, including a preview of two games from my work-in-progress Prealgebra & Geometry Games.
It’s a great way to get started with playful math!
This week, my publisher Tabletop Academy Press is offering a free copy of the Sampler to TWO lucky winners.
[Winners with a U.S. mailing address will receive both paperback (by U.S. Media Mail) and ebook (by online download) versions of the book. International winners will receive ebooks only.]
How to Enter the Giveaway
The giveaway is over, but I’d still love to hear your “math memory” comments.
- Share a math memory! Scroll down to leave a comment with something from your school days, a cute thing your child has said, or anything else about learning or playing with math.
Congratulations to our winners: Michael and Caroline. Check your email for details on how to claim your Let’s Play Math Sampler books.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 
Our very first day of “officially” homeschooling, I got out a Hershey bar and my 5yo and I discussed all the different ways we could break it apart—giving equal amounts to me, herself and her sister. Math can be delicious. 😋
Sounds like a great way to improve anyone’s attitude toward math!
My son is 4.5 years old so we are not doing formal lessons yet- just reading and playing math games, working with manipulatives for now. But it always cracks my husband and me up when my son asks for math at bedtime to delay going to bed. He just wants to have a little “more fun” before bed lol.
Kids can be so creative when it comes to delaying bedtime. 😀 It sounds like you’re laying a good foundation for learning!
This is a math “joke” my son made after reading Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales Alamo All Stars.
What do you do when there are three ones and three eights in Texas?
Connect the ones to the eights to make three 18’s
Then add two 18’s together.
18+18=36.
Slam those two together to make 1836–the year Texas was born.
A numberplay joke. I love it!
Your son might enjoy playing with the Year Game. Take the digits from this year (2,0,1,9) and see how many different numbers you can make:
https://denisegaskins.com/2019/01/01/2019-mathematics-game-playful-math-for-all-ages/
Back in elementary school I used to love doing equation crossword puzzles. Now I get to enjoy them again with my son who is homeschooled.
Sounds like fun! Do you make your own, on graph paper or something? Or do you have a Scrabble-like game?
One summer I remember getting so bored (I bet upper elementary grades) I got the dice from the Monopoly game and kept tallies on what I rolled—I think the goal was 100rolls—I just remember realizing the sums closer to the middle stretched way out in front of either extreme end. Epiphany!
Cool! We played a game like that in my homeschool co-op class:
The “1” is a trick number, of course. After the first game, kids realize it’s impossible to roll a one with two dice. If the player removes all their other tokens, you can let them roll a single die to try for it.
I like seeing something “click” in math with my kids. Like when they realize that decimals aren’t that herd, and that they’ve been doing them all along with money!
That is one of the joys of parenting/teaching, isn’t it? When we see the “Aha!” moment on a child’s face.
When teaching why inverting the second fraction to divide fractions works, my daughter stopped me and said, “Hang on a minute, my brain just exploded.’
LOL! Math will do that to us. 😀
Math has always been a challenge for my daughter. I’m interested in this giveaway because maybe the fun games would help her enjoy it more!
Games are a great way for children to learn and practice without the stress of schoolwork.
While you’re waiting for the giveaway to end, you might enjoy some of these games on my blog: https://denisegaskins.com/2017/01/07/my-favorite-math-games/
My kids love learning with food. Fractions with pie or pizza always make it 10 times more fun, and memorable!
And ratios with lemonade, or those atrocious mixtures my sons used to make with all different types of sodas. Food is a wonderful manipulative.
Remember, for fractions, to use models other than round food, too. For example, Hershey bars (from Mallory’s comment earlier) offer a variety of delicious fraction explorations.
Best math memory is having an online math meeting with other homeschooling parents with everyone sharing ideas and asking questions on how to nuture math skills through play. Every participant donated money towards buying wound care for a little girl with epidermolysis bullosa.
That sounds like an online version of the “Homeschool Mom’s Night Out” we used to do, back when my kids were younger. Kept me going through some rough times. 🙂
I hope the little girl is doing well. What a terrible disease!
My kids refer to mistakes they make in math as “duck counting” (based on a scene with Quack in Peep and the big wide world). It helps them think that there’s always more than one way to look at a problem, even a duck’s way.
Duck counting — cute!
Mistakes are both wonderful and frustrating. Wonderful, because they can point out things we need to learn. And frustrating because we’ll never be free of them. We’re human, so even when we understand what we’re doing, we still make silly mental glitches.