Here are a couple of fun foldable projects to try with your kids.
Both of the projects below start with squares of paper. Do you know how to convert any piece of paper into a square? Here are two methods.
Children learn best through interaction with others, and mental math prompts can lead to fascinating conversations, listening as our kids apply their creativity to the many ways numbers interact.
With mental math, students master the true 3R’s of math: to Recognize and Reason about the Relationships between numbers.
And these 3Rs are the foundation of algebra, which explains why flexibility and confidence in mental math is one of the best predictors of success in high school math and beyond.
Multiplication involves scaling one number by another, making it grow twice as big, or three times as much, or eightfold the size. Multiplication by a fraction scales the opposite direction, shrinking to half or a third or five-ninths the original amount.
The key friendly numbers for multiplication and division are the doubles and the square numbers. As with addition and subtraction, students can estimate the answer using any math facts they know and then adjust as needed.
How many ways might children think their way through the most-missed multiplication fact, 8 × 7?
The question hits my inbox whenever parents start planning for a new school year:
“Hello! I am on the board of a homeschool co-op. We have had requests for a math club and wondered if you have any tips for starting one. We service children from K-10th and would need to try to meet the needs of as many ages as possible.”
There are several ways you might organize a homeschool math club, depending on the students you have and on your goals. I think you would have to split the students by age groups — it is very hard to keep that wide of a range of students interested. Then decide whether you want an activity-oriented club or a more academic focus.
When I started my first math club, I raided the math shelves in the children’s section at my library (510-519) for anything that interested me. I figured that if an activity didn’t interest me, I couldn’t make it fun for the kids. Over the years we have done a variety of games, puzzles, craft projects, and more — always looking for something that was NOT like whatever the kids would be doing in their textbooks at home.
Let’s look at the possibilities by grade level…
Would you like some great ideas for reading and playing math with your kids?
Sue VanHattum put together a delightful collection of mathematical fiction in honor of Math Storytelling Day:
What are you waiting for? Come join the fun!
Click Here to Read the Carnival Blog
Continue reading Playful Math 182: The Storytelling Carnival
By doing mental math, we help our children use the basic principles of arithmetic to simplify problems so they can think about number relationships, mastering the basic structures of how numbers work.
And the more our children practice these structures in mental math, the better prepared they will be to recognize the same principles in algebra.
The basic idea of subtraction is finding the difference between two quantities: comparing a larger amount to a smaller one, figuring out what’s left when you remove a part, or finding the distance between two measurements (or two points on the number line).
When you work with young children learning subtraction, remember our two key mental-math strategies.
For early subtraction with numbers less than 20, the most important friendly numbers are 5 and 10, the pairs of numbers that make 10, and the doubles.
When children apply their creative minds to reasoning about math, they can use friendly numbers to get close to an answer, and then tweak the result as needed.
