MathCounts — Ready or Not, Here It Comes

[Feature photo above “You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch” from CheezBurger.com.]

Okay, kids, I know you’re on break, but Mr. Grinch would tell you that’s no excuse to laze around playing games and eating cookies. There is only a month until our school MathCounts competition, which doesn’t give you much time to prepare. I’ve collected several resources to build up your mental muscle-power before the test…

Continue reading MathCounts — Ready or Not, Here It Comes

Blogging Without a Computer

funny pictures of cats with captions

In case you’ve been wondering, my old computer finally bit the dust a couple of months ago. I’ve been living out of a flash drive, begging time on my kids’ computers between “homework” sessions — do you know how hard it is to drag a teenage girl away from Facebook? — and barely keeping up with email.

But I do have some blackboard quotes saved up from this semester and a few drafts on the back burner. I will get back to blogging someday, I promise!

Contig Game: Master Your Math Facts

[Photo by Photo Mojo via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).]

Yahtzee and other board games provide a modicum of math fact practice. But for intensive, thought-provoking math drill, I can’t think of any game that would beat Contig.

Math concepts: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, order of operations, mental math
Number of players: 2 – 4
Equipment: Contig game board, three 6-sided dice, pencil and scratch paper for keeping score, and bingo chips or wide-tip markers to mark game squares

Set Up

Place the game board and dice between players, and give each player a marker or pile of chips. (Markers do not need to be different colors.) Write the players’ names at the top of the scratch paper to make a score sheet.

Continue reading Contig Game: Master Your Math Facts

Math History Tidbits: Agnesi, Euler, and China

Alexandria JonesI’ve fallen behind on my project of transcribing my Alexandria Jones stories. Finally, here are a few more tidbits from math history, along with links to relevant Internet sites and a few math puzzles for your students to try.

I hope you find them interesting.

Continue reading Math History Tidbits: Agnesi, Euler, and China

Math Club: Counting 101

[Fature photo above by ThunderChild tm.]

The last couple of weeks, in Math Club, we’ve been learning to count. My new set of MathCounts students have never heard of combinatorics, so we started at the very beginning:

Continue reading Math Club: Counting 101

Quotations Archive — Browse and Enjoy!


[Photo by PhillipC.]

I love quotations, don’t you? Everything I might possibly want to say, someone else has already said it better than I ever could. Now I’ve put together all of my blackboard quotes from the homeschool co-op classes, as well as a few longer quotations I used in past blog posts, and archived them in one convenient place.

Quotations

I hope you have as much fun reading the quotes as I have had collecting them.