Playful Math Carnival 146 via Find the Factors

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Check out the latest carnival of playful math:

Each monthly Playful Math Education Blog Carnival brings you a great new collection of puzzles, math conversations, teaching tips, and all sorts of mathy fun. It’s like a free online magazine of mathematical adventures, helpful and inspiring no matter when you read them.

Iva put together this huge and amazing collection of mathematical games, activities, art projects, hands-on fun, math storybooks, poetry, and more.

Click Here to Read the Carnival Blog

Help Us Keep the Carnival Going

The Playful Math Blog Carnival wants you!

The carnival is a joint effort. We depend on our volunteer hosts to collect blog posts and write the carnival each month.

Putting together a blog carnival can be a lot of work, but it’s a great opportunity to share the work of bloggers you admire and to discover new math-friends online. I love that part of being a host!

Classroom teachers, homeschoolers, college professors, unschoolers, or anyone who likes to play around with math — if you would like to take a turn hosting the carnival, please speak up.

Homeschooling? Check Out These Math Goodies

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

How to Homeschool Math: A long page full of my best tips on homeschooling math in a low-stress, creative, playful way. No matter which curriculum you use—unschoolers, too!

Get regular email updates with playful math activity ideas and other fun tidbits when you join my email newsletter.

My Let’s Play Math Sampler ebook contains short excerpts from my most popular books. You can get it for free!

Notice, Wonder, Create

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Many homeschooling parents dream of a mathematical magic bullet — a game, app, or book that will help their children learn math and enjoy it.

As in life, so also in math, there is no magic solution.

Do you want your children to learn math and enjoy it? Teach them to be Math Makers.

When they create their own math, students build deep, personal connections to math concepts. They think about the relationships between numbers, shapes, and patterns. Math becomes personal.

Toys, hobbies, favorite stories — all can be fodder for math creation.

Where Do Math Makers Get Ideas?

Let the child choose something to think about.

Make an “I Notice” list. How does that item relate to math? What patterns or shapes can you see?

Or how would the story characters use numbers in their daily lives? Would they cook, or go shopping? Might they build something? Would they decorate it with a design? What would they count or measure?

Make an “I Wonder” list. How many different ways might you turn the things you noticed into questions? What else might you ask?

Then turn one of your noticings or wonderings into a math story, poem, puzzle, drawing, or game. Create your own math. Share your creation with family and friends.

Now Get Published

Join the Student Math Makers team. We’d love to add your math creation to our collection and share it with viewers all around the world!

Download a Math Makers Invitation and Submission Form below:

 
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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.

If you liked this post, and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal: paypal.me/DeniseGaskinsMath. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.

Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!

“Notice, Wonder, Create” copyright © 2021 by Denise Gaskins. Feature photo (top) by MI PHAM via Unsplash.com.

Math Makers: Write a Poem

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Last week, I mentioned my new project, the Student Math Makers Gallery where children and teens can share their original math creations with the world.

So this week, I’m offering inspiration to get your children’s creative juices flowing.

Let’s Write Math Poetry

April is National Poetry Month, and it’s also Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month.

What better way to celebrate than writing math poetry?

  • Write a poem about a math concept or idea, using your favorite style of verse.
  • Or write a poem about any subject, using a mathematical constraint.
  • Or both: write a poem about math, constrained by math.

Here are some examples…

Continue reading Math Makers: Write a Poem

New! Your Student Can Be a Math Maker

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

When children create their own math, they build a deep understanding of mathematical concepts and relationships.

And it’s fun!

So take a break from your normal math program to play with creative math. Students can:

Check Out the Gallery

We have a few entries already in the Student Math Makers Gallery.

Click Here To Visit the Gallery

Join the Student Math Makers

We’d love to add your students’ math to our collection and share it with viewers all around the world!

To submit a math creation, download a Math Makers Invitation and Submission Form below:

 
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This blog is reader-supported.

If you’d like to help fund the blog on an on-going basis, then please head to my Patreon page.

If you liked this post, and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal: paypal.me/DeniseGaskinsMath. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.

Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!

“New! Your Student Can Be a Math Maker” copyright © 2021 by Denise Gaskins. “Creating Math Puzzles by Sian Zelbo, the author of Camp Logic, via NaturalMath.com.

Playful Math Carnival 145 via Math Hombre

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Check out the latest carnival of playful math:

Each monthly Playful Math Education Blog Carnival brings you a great new collection of puzzles, math conversations, teaching tips, and all sorts of mathy fun. It’s like a free online magazine of mathematical adventures, helpful and inspiring no matter when you read them.

John put together this wonderful collection of mathematical games, art projects, books, math essays, puzzles, and more.

Click Here to Read the Carnival Blog

Continue reading Playful Math Carnival 145 via Math Hombre

Final (?) Lockdown Ebook Sale

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Would anyone have guessed we’d still be under pandemic social restrictions after a year?

Certainly not me!

And now that spring is in the air … Well, at least it is in the northern hemisphere. Would that be called “Up Yonder,” as opposed to “Down Under”? … Anyway, whatever you call it, everyone is getting antsy. We’re all ready to be set free, whenever our governments give in.

To help your family keep busy through the final (we hope!) lockdowns, my publisher is offering a 30% discount coupon on everything at our Tabletop Academy Press online store.

That includes all my math books and playful activity guides, plus my daughter’s fantasy fiction epic, The Riddled Stone.

Enter STAYSAFE2021 at checkout.
(Expires March 31, 2021.)

Shop Now

Prealgebra & Geometry Games Now Available

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Publication Day!

Prealgebra & Geometry: Math Games for Middle School hits the online bookstores today.

Check Your Favorite Store

You can prepare your children for high school math by playing with positive and negative integers, number properties, mixed operations, algebraic functions, coordinate geometry, and more. Prealgebra & Geometry features 41 kid-tested games, offering a variety of challenges for students in 4–9th grades and beyond.

A true understanding of mathematics requires more than the ability to memorize procedures. This book helps your children learn to think mathematically, giving them a strong foundation for future learning.

And don’t worry if you’ve forgotten all the math you learned in school. I’ve included plenty of definitions and explanations throughout the book. It’s like having a painless math refresher course as you play.

Continue reading Prealgebra & Geometry Games Now Available

Playful Math Carnival 144: Anniversary Edition

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Welcome to the 144th edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival — 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.

Bookmark this post, so you can take your time browsing.

There’s so much playful math to enjoy!

By tradition, we would start the carnival with a puzzle/activity in honor of our 144th edition. But this time, I want to take a peek back at the history of our carnival.

But if you’d rather jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.

Continue reading Playful Math Carnival 144: Anniversary Edition