Summer Slowdown

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

It happens this way every summer: I think that when school’s out, I’ll have time to catch up on things. But school is never out, because we’re homeschoolers — and something else always comes up to make us even more busy than normal. This year, an emergency forced dh to move his engineering office from town to home. It’s great to have him close at hand, but spring cleaning has turned into a total house reorganization to make room.

Niner's baby snapping turtle sitting on her wrist
And then Niner and Kitten adopted a couple of new pets. Here’s a picture of Niner’s new snapping turtle. The old one is getting so big he eats feeder fish by the dozen, but she plans to release him back into the creek as soon as the spring floods go down. Kitten rescued two baby birds (normally the dogs take care of wind-blown fledglings), so we have to find room for yet another cage in our menagerie.

In the meantime, this month’s Math Teachers at Play carnival is coming home to my blog, so I’d better get to work on that. If you would like to share a blog post about learning, teaching, or just playing around with math, I’d love to have you send it in. Just click here and fill out the handy automatic submission form.

Update, July 2011: Niner wrote a blog post on the turtles, with photos. Kitten had one of her babies die (sad!) but the other grew up enough to be released into the woods across the creek.

Math Teachers at Play #38 via Mathematics and Multimedia

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Welcome to the May 20, 2011 edition of Math Teachers at Play. Before beginning the carnival, let us have some interesting facts about 38.

  • The sum of the squares first three primes
  • The number of years it took the Israelites to travel from Kadesh Barnea to the Zered valley in Deuteronomy
  • There number of surviving plays written by William Shakespeare
  • The atomic number of strontium
  • Thirty seven and 38 are the first pair of consecutive positive integers not divisible by any of their digits.

Now, let the carnival begin!

Click here to enjoy plenty of mathy fun…

Working on My Let’s Play Math! Books

Posted on by Denise Gaskins
Workplace stress caused by an unsuitable work ...
Image via Wikipedia

This blog originally grew out of my books, and now it’s coming full circle: New, expanded editions of my long-out-of-print books are ripening on the vine, growing out of the blog. To bring them to harvest, I’m going to need your help.

The Books

I’m working on the games books first because I think they will be the most helpful supplements to any math program.

  • Let’s Play Math! Number Games for All Ages
    This book will include games like Tens Concentration and Hit Me, as well as tips for teaching negative numbers, the times table, and more. Never before published, because it was planned as the fifth book in my earlier how-to-teach-homeschool-math series, but my self-publishing experiment ended after book four.
  • Others to be announced, if I ever get the first two done…

Continue reading Working on My Let’s Play Math! Books

Math Teachers at Play #37 via Maths Insider

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

The new Math Teachers at Play blog carnival is ready for your browsing pleasure:

Welcome to the 37th edition of the Math Teachers at Play blog carnival. I’m delighted to host the carnival here this month at Maths Insider!

For those new to the Math Teachers at Play carnival, this carnival celebrates some of the best maths teaching articles written by teachers, parents and bloggers each month. …

In keeping with tradition, I’ve presented a “37″ puzzle and some interesting arithmetic facts about the number 37 below. …

Read the whole thing!

Good News for a Change

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

As I was checking through archive posts and clearing out the dead links, I found a couple of links that I thought would be dead but which are still good. So I am re-posting them here, for your browsing pleasure:

Free Shakespeare for Fun and Copywork

CurrClick (which carries the Math Mammoth workbook series) is offering Quotations from Shakespeare’s Plays as a free download. This ebook includes copywork tips from Charlotte Mason and about 30 pages of passages from Macbeth, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, etc.

[And if you are planning a study of the Bard, you won’t want to miss the many other Internet resources in my original post.]

Great Leaders in a Crisis: Lincoln, Churchill

What does it take to lead your nation through a crisis? Character, determination, wisdom, the courage of your convictions. What can we learn about leadership from those who have been there, done that?

Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill are two of these great leaders — men whose courage and conviction took their nations through challenging moments and forever altered the course of Western civilization…

The Teaching Company (one of my favorite resources for homeschooling high school) is offering two free lectures for the downloading: Great Leaders: Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill.

[More details in my original post.]

Radiation Sanity Chart

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

With news reports of radiation from Japan being found from California to Massachusetts — and now even in milk — math teachers need to help our students put it all in perspective.

xkcd to the rescue!

Pajamas Media offers a brief history of radiation, plus an analysis of our exposure in Banana Equivalent Doses:

And the EPA offers a FAQ:

[T]he levels being seen now are 25 times below the level that would be of concern even for infants, pregnant women or breastfeeding women, who are the most sensitive to radiation… At this time, there is no need to take extra precautions… Iodine-131 disappears relatively quickly in the environment.

— Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
pages 4-5 of EPA FAQ

[Hat tip: Why Homeschool.]

Can You Find These AWOL Math Websites?

Posted on by Denise Gaskins
by √oхέƒx™ via flickr

In the course of my bloggy spring cleaning, I’ve made some terrible discoveries. Some of my favorite resources have disappeared off the internet. Or perhaps they’ve moved, and I just haven’t found their new homes.

Do you know where these websites went?

A Very Short History of Mathematics

This irreverant romp through the history of mathematics by W. W. O. Schlesinger and A. R. Curtis was read to the Adams Society (St. John’s College Mathematical Society) at their 25th anniversary dinner, Michaelmas Term, 1948.

Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine found a copy, but I’d love to replace this link with the article’s new location:

[Warning: Do not attempt to read this article while drinking coffee or other spittable beverage!]

Update: James Clare found the article’s new home here. Thank you!

Continue reading Can You Find These AWOL Math Websites?

Bloggy Spring Cleaning Continues

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Still on course with my state-sponsored blog overhaul, and Google Reader insists on displaying every old post as new. What a nuisance! The email feed seems unaffected. (And not everyone is having the problem with Reader, either — see Comments below.)

Amazon won the reader poll (and it’s my favorite, too), so I’m converting all my old affiliate book links to just-plain Amazon links. At the same time, I’m checking for dead links and other dust bunnies among the old posts. I’ve worked my way up to June 2007 — four more years to go — and then I’ll start on my blogroll (a monster task!) and other pages.

Like normal housecleaning, it never ends …

Does Anyone Know Where the La Habra Math Timeline Went?

The worst news so far is that the La Habra Math History Timeline has disappeared. What a shame! Does anyone out there know where it might have gone? I would love to link to its new site.

Thanks to the Wayback Machine, here’s a glimpse at the old site. Math discoveries, publications, and other tidbits — from paleolithic number bones to the present:

I changed the links on my Math Resources page to the wayback pages, too. My apologies to those who got sent to a junk site by the old, defunct links.

Math Teachers at Play #36 via Math Hombre

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

The carnival is posted!

36 has long been one of my favorite numbers, but faced with this carnival, it was hard to figure out why. It’s a square number that’s a product of two squares, but that’s not too rare. (Why?) It’s the 6th perfect square and the sum of the first six odds, but that’s not too remarkable. (Why?) It’s the 8th triangular number, but not a Sierpinski step or anything… wait! It’s a square triangular number? How common is that? 1, 36, then…?

Read the whole thing…

What Is the Name of This Book? … Is Back!

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

In the process of updating old book links (and otherwise cleaning up old posts), I’ve been spending more time than normal at the bookstore. I just noticed that Raymond Smullyan’s What Is the Name of This Book? is scheduled to come out this August — and it’s already available for pre-order. WooHoo!

Can To Mock a Mockingbird be far behind? Oh, and Alice in Puzzleland — I want that one, too!