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!
Sue VanHattum put together this carnival of evergreen links — helpful and inspiring no matter when you read them.
This carnival offers summer math resources, a four-4s puzzle, set theory for kids, magic math books, fresh insight into the Math War game, counting challenges, and the Fundamental Theorem of calculus. 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.
The monthly Playful Math Blog Carnival is almost here. If you’ve written a blog post about math, we’d love to have you join us!
Posts must be relevant to students or teachers of school-level mathematics (that is, anything from preschool up to first-year calculus). Old posts are welcome, as long as they haven’t been published in recent editions of this carnival.
Click here to submit your blog post
Don’t procrastinate: The deadline for entries is this Friday, June 22. The carnival will be posted next week at Math Mama Writes 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:
[“Night At The County Fair” photo (top) by Bob Jagendorf (CC BY-NC 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.
“As we go through each lesson, it seems like my daughter has a good handle on the concepts, but when we get to the test she forgets everything. When I ask her about it, she shrugs and says, ‘I don’t know.’ What do you do when your child completely loses what she has learned?”
Forgetting is the human brain’s natural defense mechanism. It keeps us from being overwhelmed by the abundance of sensory data that bombards us each moment of every day.
Our children’s minds will never work like a computer that can store a program and recall it flawlessly months later.
Sometimes, for my children, a gentle reminder is enough to drag the forgotten concept back out of the dust-bunnies of memory.
Other times, I find that they answer “I don’t know” out of habit, because it’s easier than thinking about the question. And because they’d prefer to be doing something else.
And still other times, I find out they didn’t understand the topic as well as I thought they did when we went through it before.
No matter how we adults try to explain the concepts, some kids want to be answer-getters. They don’t want to do the hard work of thinking a concept through until it makes a connection in their minds. They want to memorize a few steps and crank through the lesson to get it over with.
In all these cases, what helps me the most is conversation.
My children and I always talk about our math. I ask questions like “What do you think? What do you remember? Can you explain the question to me? What are they asking for?”
And, whether the child’s answer is right or wrong, I practice my poker face. Trying not to give anything away, I ask, “How did you figure it out? Can you think of a way to confirm your answer?”
Not sure how to talk about math with your children?
If you have preschool and elementary-age kids, read Christopher Danielson’s inspiring book and blog:
For middle school and older students, check out Fawn Nguyen’s wonderful collection of Math Talks. Be sure to read the “Teachers” page for tips and talking points:
“You don’t need special skills to do this. If you can read with your kids, then you can talk math with them. You can support and encourage their developing mathematical minds.”
— Christopher Danielson
Talking Math with Your Kids
Games are a great way to practice math. Check out these (free!) math games for all ages:
And if you have elementary-age children, here are a few grade-level tips to help them learn (and remember) math concepts:
Credits: Girl in field photo by SOURCE Hydration Systems and Sandals technology via Flickr. (CC BY 2.0) Nigerian classroom photo by Doug Linstedt and young girl studying by pan xiaozhen 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.
Check out the new playful math blog carnival at Math Hombre blog. John put together a great collection of 30+ math games, activities, and teaching tips:
The carnival features hands-on papercrafts, open-ended projects, challenging puzzles, inspiring tips, and thoughtful essays. And comics, too.
Click here to go read the carnival blog
And if you’re a blogger, be sure to submit your blog post for next month’s carnival!
Past carnivals are still full of mathy treasure. Check them out:
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 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.
