I have a new podcast interview, and I think you’ll enjoy it!
Check out Pam Barnhill’s Homeschool Better Together on your favorite podcast app, or listen on the website:
Here’s an excerpt…
Podcast: Making Math a Delight
Playful Math 179: Our Sweet Sixteen Carnival
Welcome to the sweet-16 birthday edition of the Playful Math Carnival. Originally called Math Teachers at Play, our first carnival was published in February 2009.
Each Playful Math Carnival offers a smorgasbord of delectable tidbits of mathy fun. It’s like a free online magazine devoted to learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to high school.
There’s so much playful math to enjoy!
By tradition, we start the carnival with a math activity in honor of our 179th edition. But if you’d rather jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.
NOTE: Our wonderful volunteer hosts have kept the Playful Math Carnival going when so many other blog carnivals died off. If you’d like to sign up to host the carnival for a month, email Denise for information.
Try These Prime Puzzles
Did you know there are 179 even-numbered days this year?
- How many even-numbered days will there be in a leap year?
- But there are 365 days in a standard year and 366 in a leap year. Shouldn’t there be half that many even-numbered days?
179 is a prime number, and it’s also a knockout prime. You can knock out any of the digits, and what’s left is still prime: 17, 19, or 79.
- Can you find another knockout prime number?
179 is a twin prime. That means that one of its odd-numbered neighbors is also prime.
- Is the other twin 177 or 181? Can you tell without looking it up?
- Why are twin primes limited to the odd numbers? That doesn’t seem fair!
179 is also an emirp. That’s a special kind of prime that forms a different prime number when you write it backwards: 971 is also prime.
- How many emirps can you find?
“A palindrome is a word that when written in reverse results in the same word. for example, ‘racecar’ reversed is still ‘racecar’. Related to palindromes are semordnilaps. These are words that when written in reverse result in a distinct valid word. For example, ‘stressed’ written in reverse is ‘desserts’. Not all words are palindromes or semordnilaps.
“While certainly not all numbers are palindromes, all non-palindromic numbers when written in reverse will form semordnilaps.
“Narrowing to primes brings back the same trichotomy as with words: some numbers are emirps, some numbers are palindromic primes, but some are neither.”
Why I Love Kickstarter
Over the several weeks, you’ll be hearing a lot about Kickstarter and my Math Journaling Adventures project. I’m proud of the books, and I want to spread the news as far and wide as possible.
You’ll appreciate how these books make it easy to weave playful math into your family’s schedule. Just open to any page for a puzzle, activity, game, investigation, or other creative prompt.
But I know there are many readers who don’t know much about crowdfunding. Some people even think that a campaign like this is just online begging.
So I want to share what I totally love about Kickstarter and how much it offers you, the customer:
(1) It’s the “New World” of publishing.
In the old days, traditional publishing companies paid writers in advance to write the books the publisher wanted to see. In this new world, you get to choose and support the writers creating books you want to read.
Coming Soon: Math Journaling Adventures
Coming Soon! On March 3, I’ll be launching the first installment in my new book series, the Math Journaling Adventures.
You’ll love these books because they make creative math investigations open-and-go for busy parents and teachers.
And the Kickstarter prelaunch page is now live. That means you can sign up to get an email from Kickstarter as soon as the campaign launches:
If you back the campaign on launch day, you can catch a great deal with the Earlybird discount pledge levels.
Morning Coffee: Professional Development for Homeschooling Parents and Other Teachers
Lately, I’ve spent most of my writing time thinking about the value of narration—the Charlotte Mason approach to teaching by getting kids to put ideas in their own words.
For students, I’m writing a new series of Math Adventure Journals to get them thinking about math and putting those thoughts into words. If you’re interested, sign up to be notified when the Kickstarter goes live.
But we parents can harness the value of narration in our own learning. After all, one of the best ways we can help our children learn mathematics (or anything else) is to be lifelong learners ourselves.
To that end, I’ve decided to relaunch my “Morning Coffee” series of professional development posts for homeschooling parents.
Here’s How It Works
As I read articles and follow rabbit trails around the internet, I’ll collect the posts that speak to me. Then I’ll share these in a printable format with journaling pages for your response.
Since I’m interested in math education, many of the articles I read will be about math—but the principles of learning apply to every subject we teach.
To kick off the series, let’s start with one of my favorite articles ever…
Morning Coffee # 1: Learning to Ask Good Questions
Download your printable Morning Coffee journal
David Butler’s post Twelve matchsticks: focus or funnel presents an interesting math puzzle. But even better, it opens up a rabbit hole of thought-provoking posts about how to talk with children—or anyone:
“The approach where you have an idea in your head of how it should be done and you try to get the student to fill in the blanks is called funnelling. It’s actually a rather unpleasant experience as a student to be funnelled by a teacher. You don’t know what the teacher is getting at, and often you feel like there is a key piece of information they are withholding from you, and when it comes, the punchline feels rather flat.”
The printable file includes links to three more articles as I follow the rabbit around the internet. Enjoy!
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Are you looking for more creative ways to play math with your kids? Check out all my books, printable activities, and cool mathy merch at Denise Gaskins’ Playful Math Store. Or join my email newsletter.
This blog is reader-supported. If you’d like to help fund the blog on an on-going basis, then please join me on Patreon for mathy inspiration, tips, and an ever-growing archive of printable activities.
“Morning Coffee: Professional Development for Homeschooling Parents and Other Teachers” copyright © 2025 by Denise Gaskins. Image at the top of post copyright © Kira auf der Heide / Unsplash.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 