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 my new printables for playing math with your kids:
The free 50-page PDF Hundred Charts Galore! file features 1–100 charts, 0–99 charts, bottom’s-up versions, multiple-chart pages, blank charts, game boards, and more. Everything you need to play the activities in my 70+ Things to Do with a Hundred Chart book (coming soon from Tabletop Academy Press).
Download Hundred Charts Galore
If all goes well, the hundred chart book should be out (at least in ebook format) by the end of this month. While you’re waiting, you can try some of the activities in my all-time most popular blog post:
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.
It’s carnival time again. Activities, games, lessons, hands-on fun — if you’ve written a blog post about math, we’d love to have you join our Playful Math Blog Carnival.
Posts must be relevant to students or teachers of school-level mathematics (that is, anything from preschool up through first-year 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 Sunday, November 25. But if you wait that long, you’ll forget. So send in your submission today!
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: “Two Bloggers, after Norman Rockwell” sketch (top) by Mike Licht (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.
Learning math is more like taking a meandering nature walk than like climbing a ladder of one-topic-after-another. Kids need to wander around the concepts, notice things, wonder about them, and enjoy the journey.
— Denise Gaskins
from a comment on the Living Math Forum
CREDITS: Background photo courtesy of Annie Spratt 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.
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. Enjoy!
Sonya put together this carnival of evergreen links — helpful and inspiring no matter when you read them — featuring math comics, a couple conversations on Euler, Truchet and infinity tiles, Islamic art, counting and counting ropes, negative numbers, 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.
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.
Math Concepts: number symbols, numerical order, thinking ahead.
Players: two or more.
Equipment: one math deck of playing cards (remove face cards and jokers), or a double deck for more than four players; additional cards to use as train cars.
Give each player four to six miscellaneous cards (such as the face cards and jokers you removed from the card deck) to serve as the cars of their number trains.
Lay these cards face down in a horizontal row, as shown. Shuffle the math card deck and spread it on the table as a fishing pond.
On your turn, draw one card and play it face up on one of your train cars. The numbers on your train must increase from left to right, but they do not need to be in consecutive order. If you do not have an appropriate blank place for your card, you have two choices:
• Mix the new card back into the fishing pond.
• Use the new number to replace one of your other cards, and then discard the old one.
The first player to complete a train of numbers that increases from left to right wins the game.
House Rule: Decide how strict you will be about the “increases from left to right” rule and repeated numbers. Does “1, 3, 3, 7, 8” count as a valid number train? Or will the player have to keep trying for a card to replace one of the threes?
For older players: You can adapt Number Train to play with more advanced students:
This post is an excerpt from my book Counting & Number Bonds: Math Games for Early Learners, available now at your favorite online book dealer.
One of my favorite stores, Rainbow Resource Center, is offering several of my books at a great discount.
Check them out!
You don’t need a set of worksheets or lesson plans to learn math. All you need is an inquiring mind and something interesting to think about.
Play. Discuss. Notice. Wonder.
Enjoy.
— Denise Gaskins
Playing Complex Fractions with Your Kids
CREDITS: Background photo courtesy of Steve Shreve 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.
