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!
Check out the latest carnival of playful math for all ages:
Each monthly 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!
Simon Gregg put this carnival together a few weeks ago, and I should have posted a link before now, but it’s been a hard few months here, and too many things got shoved aside. Still the posts are evergreen — helpful and inspiring no matter when you read them.
This carnival offers summer camp activities, dancing geometric patterns, new books to enjoy, pattern blocks, the math of peg solitaire, Q-bitz fraction talks, and a taste of some great math conversations on Twitter. And plenty 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:
Don’t procrastinate: The deadline for entries is this Friday, May 25. The carnival will be posted next week at Math Hombre 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.
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.
I’ve been working on my next Playful Math Singles book, based on the popular Things to Do with a Hundred Chart post.
My hundred chart list began many years ago as seven ideas for playing with numbers. Over the years, it grew to its current 30+ activities.
Now, in preparing the new book, my list has become a monster. I’ve collected almost 70 ways to play with numbers, shapes, and logic from preschool to middle school. Just yesterday I added activities for fraction and decimal multiplication, and also tips for naming complex fractions. Wow!
Gonna have to edit that cover file…
In the “Advanced Patterns” chapter, I have a section on math debates. The point of a math debate isn’t that one answer is “right” while the other is “wrong.” You can choose either side of the question — the important thing is how well you support your argument.
Here’s activity #69 in the current book draft.
When you add fractions, you face a problem that most people never think of. Namely, you have to decide exactly what you are talking about.
For instance, what is one-tenth plus one-tenth?
Well, you might say that:
+
= 
But, you might also say that:
+
= 
So what happens if you see this question on a math test:
If you write the answer “
Is that fair? Why, or why not?
CREDITS: Feature photo (above) by Thor/geishaboy500 via Flickr (CC BY 2.0). “One is one … or is it?” video by Christopher Danielson via TED-Ed. This math debate was suggested by Marilyn Burns’s blog post Can 1/3 + 1/3 = 2/6? It seemed so!
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.
“In 2018, I want to change the world.
…
I want to make it possible for more children to claim math as their favorite subject.
…
Math is how we describe our world when words are not enough. Everyone deserves to speak math and to play math, to enjoy its beauty and its power.”— Geoff White
The Grade 10 Math Crunch, or Hitting the Wall at Grade 10
Wednesday Wisdom features a quote to inspire my fellow homeschoolers and math education peeps. Background photo by Bobby Johnson 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.
“At heart, mathematical thinking is little more than formalized common sense. It always has been. Which means it is something we can all do.”
— Keith Devlin
How Today’s Pros Solve Math Problems
If you have some time to spend pondering big ideas, dig into Devlin’s entire series of posts about what real-world mathematics looks like and the implications for math education:
And a related series on K–12 school math:
“Make no mistake about it, acquiring that modern-day mathematical skillset definitely requires spending time carrying out the various procedures. Your child or children will still spend time ‘doing math’ in the way you remember.
“But whereas the focus used to be on mastering the skills with the goal of carrying out the procedures accurately — something that, thanks to the learning capacity of the human brain, could be achieved without deep, conceptual understanding — the focus today is on that conceptual understanding.
“That is a very different goal, and quite frankly a much more difficult one to reach.”
— Keith Devlin
All The Mathematical Methods I Learned in My University Math Degree Became Obsolete in My Lifetime
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.
Welcome to the 115th edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival — a smorgasbord of links to bloggers all around the internet who have great ideas for learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to pre-college.
In honor of Women’s History Month, this carnival features quotes from fifteen women mathematicians.
If you would like to jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.
Let the mathematical fun begin!
They came from many countries and followed a variety of interests.
They conquered new topics in mathematics and expanded the world’s understanding of old ones.
They wrestled with theorems, raised children, published articles, won awards, faced discrimination, led professional organizations, and kept going through both success and failure.
Some gained international renown, but most enjoyed quiet lives.
They studied, learned, and lived (and some still live) as most of us do — loving their families and friends, joking with colleagues, hoping to influence students.
I think you’ll find their words inspiring.
“What I really am is a mathematician. Rather than being remembered as the first woman this or that, I would prefer to be remembered, as a mathematician should, simply for the theorems I have proved and the problems I have solved.”
—Julia Robinson (1919–1985)
“All in all, I have found great delight and pleasure in the pursuit of mathematics. Along the way I have made great friends and worked with a number of creative and interesting people. I have been saved from boredom, dourness, and self-absorption. One cannot ask for more.”
—Karen Uhlenbeck (b. 1942)
Continue reading Playful Math Education Carnival 115—Women of Mathematics
Today we have a guest post — an exclusive tale by Sasha Fradkin and Allison Bishop, authors of the new math storybook Funville Adventures. Enjoy!
Funville Adventures is a math-inspired fantasy that introduces children to the concept of functions, which are personified as magical beings with powers.
Each power corresponds to a transformation such as doubling in size, rotating, copying, or changing color. Some Funvillians have siblings with opposite powers that can reverse the effects and return an object to its original state, but other powers cannot be reversed.
In this way, kids are introduced to the mathematical concepts of invertible and non-invertible functions, domains, ranges, and even functionals, all without mathematical terminology.
We know about Funville because two siblings, Emmy and Leo, were magically transported there after they went down an abandoned slide.
When they came back, Emmy and Leo shared their adventures with their friends and also brought back the following manuscript written by their new friend Blake.
