Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math
Helping families to learn and enjoy math together.
If you want to know more about my playful math books, check out my new author page. You can post comments or send me a message. I’d love to hear from you!
Visit Denise Gaskins on Facebook
You can also join the Playful Family Math discussion group or find plenty of online mathy goodness at my original Let’s Play Math Facebook page.
🙂 See you there!
Do you have a favorite blog post about math activities, games, lessons, or hands-on fun? The Playful Math Blog Carnival would love to feature your article!
We welcome math topics from preschool through the first year of calculus. Old posts are welcome, as long as they haven’t been published in past editions of this carnival.
Click here to submit your blog post
Don’t procrastinate: The deadline for entries is this Friday, September 21. The carnival will be posted next week at nebusresearch blog.
Have you noticed a new math blogger on your block that you’d like to introduce to the rest of us? Feel free to submit another blogger’s post in addition to your own. Beginning bloggers are often shy about sharing, but like all of us, they love finding new readers.
If you haven’t written anything about math lately, here are some ideas to get your creative juices flowing…
While you’re waiting for next week’s carnival, you may enjoy:
CREDITS: “Chica usando ordenador” sketch (top) by Olga Berrios (CC BY 2.0) via Flickr.
Want to help your kids learn math? Claim your free 24-page problem-solving booklet, and sign up to hear about new books, revisions, and sales or other promotions.
Check out the latest carnival of playful math for all ages:
Each monthly Playful Math Education Blog Carnival brings you a great new collection of puzzles, math conversations, crafts, teaching tips, and all sorts of mathy fun. It’s like a free online magazine of mathematical adventures. What fun!
Iva Sallay put together this carnival of evergreen links — helpful and inspiring no matter when you read them.
This carnival offers math art and poetry, kid-made books, journaling, logic, and talking math with kids. Same and Different, How Many, and other puzzles. And more!
Click Here to Read the Carnival Blog
Do you have a favorite blog post about math activities, games, lessons, or hands-on fun? The Playful Math Blog Carnival would love to feature your article!
We welcome math topics from preschool through the first year of calculus. Old posts are welcome, as long as they haven’t been published in past editions of this carnival.
To submit a blog article for consideration, fill out this form:
Have you noticed a new math blogger on your block that you’d like to introduce to the rest of us? Feel free to submit another blogger’s post in addition to your own. Beginning bloggers are often shy about sharing, but like all of us, they love finding new readers.
CREDITS: “One Galaxy” drawing by Sara Divenuto, age 10, via Hubble Space Telescope / ESA on Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
Want to help your kids learn math? Claim your free 24-page problem-solving booklet, and sign up to hear about new books, revisions, and sales or other promotions.
This fall, my homeschool co-op math class will play with math journaling.
But my earlier dot-grid notebooks were designed for adults. Too thick, too many pages. And the half-cm dot grid made lines too narrow for young writers.
So I created a new series of paperback dot-grid journals for my elementary and middle school students.
I hope you enjoy them, too!
Click here for more information
So, what can your kids do with a math journal?
Here are a few ideas:
I’m sure we’ll use several of these activities in my homeschool co-op math class this fall.
Learning math requires more than mastering number facts and memorizing rules. At its heart, math is a way of thinking.
So more than anything else, we need to teach our kids to think mathematically — to make sense of math problems and persevere in figuring them out.
Help your children learn to see with mathematical eyes, noticing and wondering about math problems.
Whenever your children need to learn a new idea in math, or whenever they get stuck on a tough homework problem, that’s a good time to step back and make sense of the math.
Kids can write their noticings and wonderings in the math journal. Or you can act as the scribe, writing down (without comment) everything child says.
For more tips on teaching students to brainstorm about math, check out these online resources from The Math Forum:
Problem-solving is a habit of mind that you and your children can learn and grow in. Help your kids practice slowing down and taking the time to fully understand a problem situation.
Almost anything your child notices or wonders can lead to a math experiment.
For example, one day my daughter played an online math game…
A math journal can be like a science lab book. Not the pre-digested, fill-in-the-blank lab books that some curricula provide. But the real lab books that scientists write to keep track of their data, and what they’ve tried so far, and what went wrong, and what finally worked.
Here are a few open-ended math experiments you might try:
Create math art. Check out my math doodling collection on Pinterest and my Dot Grid Doodling blog post. Can you draw an impossible shape?
I’d love to hear your favorite math explorations or journaling tips!
Please share in the comments section below.
P.S.: Do you have a blog? If you’d like to feature a math journal review and giveaway, I’ll provide the prize. Send a message through my contact form or leave a comment below, and we’ll work out the details.
Want to help your kids learn math? Claim your free 24-page problem-solving booklet, and sign up to hear about new books, revisions, and sales or other promotions.
If you are a homeschooler or classroom teacher, student or independent learner, or anyone else who writes about math, now is the time to send in your favorite blog post for next week’s Playful Math Blog Carnival.
Click here to submit your blog post
Don’t procrastinate: The deadline for entries is this Friday, August 24. The carnival will be posted next week at Find the Factors blog.
Have you noticed a new math blogger on your block that you’d like to introduce to the rest of us? Feel free to submit another blogger’s post in addition to your own. Beginning bloggers are often shy about sharing, but like all of us, they love finding new readers.
Help! I can’t keep the carnival going on my own.
Hosting the blog carnival can be a lot of work, but it’s fun to “meet” new bloggers through their submissions. And there’s a side-benefit: The carnival usually brings a nice little spike in traffic to your blog.
If you think you’d like to join in the fun, read the instructions on our Playful Math Blog Carnival homepage. Then leave a comment or email me to let me know which month you’d like to take.
While you’re waiting for next week’s carnival, you may enjoy:
CREDITS: “L.A. County Fair” photo (top) by Omar Bárcena (CC BY 2.0) via Flickr.]/span>
Want to help your kids learn math? Claim your free 24-page problem-solving booklet, and sign up to hear about new books, revisions, and sales or other promotions.
“When I began my college education, I still had many doubts about whether I was good enough for mathematics. Then a colleague said the decisive words to me: it is not that I am worthy to occupy myself with mathematics, but rather that mathematics is worthy for one to occupy oneself with.”
— Rózsa Péter
Mathematics is beautiful
essay in The Mathematical Intelligencer
I would like to win over those who consider mathematics useful, but colourless and dry — a necessary evil…
No other field can offer, to such an extent as mathematics, the joy of discovery, which is perhaps the greatest human joy.
The schoolchildren that I have taught in the past were always attuned to this, and so I have also learned much from them.
It never would have occurred to me, for instance, to talk about the Euclidean Algorithm in a class with twelve-year-old girls, but my students led me to do it.
I would like to recount this lesson.
What we were busy with was that I would name two numbers, and the students would figure out their greatest common divisor. For small numbers this went quickly. Gradually, I named larger and larger numbers so that the students would experience difficulty and would want to have a procedure.
I thought that the procedure would be factorization into primes.
They had still easily figured out the greatest common divisor of 60 and 48: “Twelve!”
But a girl remarked: “Well, that’s just the same as the difference of 60 and 48.”
“That’s a coincidence,” I said and wanted to go on.
But they would not let me go on: “Please name us numbers where it isn’t like that.”
“Fine. 60 and 36 also have 12 as their greatest common divisor, and their difference is 24.”
Another interruption: “Here the difference is twice as big as the greatest common divisor.”
“All right, if this will satisfy all of you, it is in fact no coincidence: the difference of two numbers is always divisible by all their common divisors. And so is their sum.”
Certainly that needed to be stated in full, but having done so, I really did want to move on.
However, I still could not do that.
A girl asked: “Couldn’t they discover a procedure to find the greatest common divisor just from that?”
They certainly could! But that is precisely the basic idea behind the Euclidean Algorithm!
So I abandoned my plan and went the way that my students led me.
— Rózsa Péter
quoted at the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
Note: When the video narrator says “Greatest Common Denominator,” he really means “Greatest Common Divisor.”
This is my third contribution to the blogging challenge #MTBoSBlaugust.
I’m aiming for at least one post each week. A simple, modest goal. But if I manage it, that will be four times the pace I’ve set in recent months.
So far, so good…
CREDITS: “Pink toned thoughts on a hike” photo courtesy of Simon Matzinger on Unsplash.
Want to help your kids learn math? Claim your free 24-page problem-solving booklet, and sign up to hear about new books, revisions, and sales or other promotions.
My son can’t stand long division or fractions. We had a lesson on geometry, and he enjoyed that — especially the 3-D shapes. If we can just get past the basics, then we’ll have time for the things he finds interesting. But one workbook page takes so long, and I’m sick of the drama. Should we keep pushing through?
Those upper-elementary arithmetic topics are important. Foundational concepts. Your son needs to master them.
Eventually.
But the daily slog through page after page of workbook arithmetic can wear anyone down.
Many children find it easier to focus on math when it’s built into a game.
Take a look at Colleen King’s Math Playground website. Or try one of the ideas on John Golden’s Math Hombre Games blog page.
Or sometimes a story helps, like my Cookie Factory Guide to Long Division.
Games are great for practicing math your child has already learned. But for introducing new concepts, you’ll probably want to follow your textbook.
Still, even with textbook math, there are ways to make the journey less tedious:
Doing math in short sessions helped us avoid the emotional melt-downs my daughter used to have.
Thinking is hard work, and if I asked for too much, she would crash.
Because I sat with her and worked together every problem, I knew what she understood and when we could skip a problem. Or sometimes even jump several pages. Which meant that, even with short lessons, we still got through our book on time.
But as I said before, textbooks include a whole lot of repetition.
Too much repetition deadens the brain.
So we also took long breaks from our textbook program. Entire school-year-long breaks, just playing with math. Letting “enrichment” activities be our whole curriculum.
As healthy as vegetables are, you would never limit your son to eating just lima beans and corn.
Similarly, be sure to feed him a varied math diet.
For example, you can follow his interest in geometry beyond the standard school topics.
Explore tessellations, Escher art, and impossible shapes such as the Penrose triangle.
Building Lego scenes is a practical application of 3-D geometry. He might even want to try stop motion animation.
Talk about how math works in real life. Ponder the choices on John Stevens’s “Would You Rather?” blog or try some of the challenges at Andrew Stadel’s Estimation 180 website. Many of these require three-dimensional reasoning.
This is my second contribution to the blogging challenge #MTBoSBlaugust.
I’m aiming for at least one post each week. A simple, modest goal. But if I manage it, that will be four times the pace I’ve set in recent months.
Two posts down…
CREDITS: Frustrated Child photo by by Pixabay on Pexels.com. Penrose Lego by Erik Johansson via Flickr (CC BY 2.0). Homework Hands photo by Tamarcus Brown on Unsplash.
This post is an excerpt from my book Let’s Play Math: How Families Can Learn Math Together—and Enjoy It, as are many of the articles in my Let’s Play Math FAQ series.
Want to help your kids learn math? Claim your free 24-page problem-solving booklet, and sign up to hear about new books, revisions, and sales or other promotions.
