How to Homeschool Math: A long page full of my best tips on homeschooling math in a low-stress, creative, playful way. No matter which curriculum you use—unschoolers, too!
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My Let’s Play Math Sampler ebook contains short excerpts from my most popular books. You can get it for free!
This game reinforces the most important model for understanding numerical and algebraic multiplication.
Many parents remember struggling to learn math. We hope to provide a better experience for our children. And one of the best ways for children to enjoy learning is through hands-on play.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s play some math!
Math Concepts: area model for multiplication.
Players: two or three.
Equipment: blank hundred chart or graph paper, two six-sided dice, pencil or marker.
Writing to Learn Math: People learn math by playing with ideas. A math journal can be like a science lab book.
Do you want your children to develop the ability to reason creatively and figure out things on their own?
Help kids practice slowing down and taking the time to fully comprehend a math topic or problem-solving situation with these classic tools of learning: Notice. Wonder. Create.
We’ve been examining the fact that, while there may be only one right answer to a math problem, but there’s never only one right way to get that answer.
What matters in math is the journey. How do your children make sense of the problem and reason their way to that answer?
As always, real math is not about the answers but the thinking.
But if we don’t want to give our children a method, how can we teach? What if we pose a problem and the child doesn’t know how to solve it?
What if our children get stumped on a subtraction calculation like 431 – 86?
Continue reading If Not Methods: Reasoning About Subtraction
Spring 2024 Sale: Save 20% off Let’s Play Math: How Families Can Learn Math Together and Enjoy It in ebook or paperback!
As school wraps up for the year in the U.S., many homeschoolers turn their minds to planning for next fall. That makes spring a great time to discover how to transform your child’s experience of math through playful discovery!
Many parents remember struggling to learn math. We hope to provide a better experience for our children.
And one of the best ways for children to enjoy learning is through hands-on play.
This game offers young children a chance to practice counting and early addition skills while racing to beat their parents.
Math Concepts: addition to one hundred, thinking ahead.
Players: two or more.
Equipment: playing cards (remove face cards and jokers), a hundred chart, and a penny or other small token.
I have a new podcast interview, and I think you’ll enjoy it!
Check out Pam Barnhill’s 10 Minutes to a Better Homeschool on your favorite podcast app, or listen on the website:
Here’s a couple of excerpts…
Continue reading Podcast: How to Transform Math Lessons without Changing your Curriculum
Writing to Learn Math: Problem-solving cares less about whether an answer is right and more about whether a solution makes sense.
Do you want your children to develop the ability to reason creatively and figure out things on their own?
Help kids practice slowing down and taking the time to fully comprehend a math topic or problem-solving situation with these classic tools of learning: Notice. Wonder. Create.
Last week, I quoted Pam Harris calling out a foundational myth of math education, the idea that we need to teach kids the methods that work on even the most difficult math problems.
“We have a misconception in math education that we think we need to teach methods so that kids can answer the craziest kind of a particular problem.
“We would be far better served to teach kids to think about the most common kinds of questions WELL, and let technology handle the crankiest.”
—Pam Harris
Since many of us grew up in schools that taught these methods, they may feel like the only sensible approach to math. Without the standard procedures, how will our kids learn to do math?
If we don’t teach subtraction with borrowing/renaming, how can students figure out calculations like 431 − 86? If we don’t teach fraction rules, how will they handle problems like 1 1/2 ÷ 3/8?
Welcome to the 172nd edition of the Playful Math Blog Carnival, a buffet of delectable tidbits of mathy fun. It’s like a free online magazine devoted to learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to high school.
The carnival went on hiatus for a couple of months due to unexpected life issues facing our volunteer hosts. But we’re back now, and ready to celebrate!
By tradition, we start the carnival with a puzzle in honor of our 172nd edition. But if you’d rather jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here for the Table of Contents.
172 is a lazy caterer number: Imaging a caterer who brought a single large pie to serve the whole party. He needs to cut it into as many pieces as he can, using the fewest (straight) cuts he can get away with.
But for those of you who have followed the carnival for years, you may remember we played with the lazy caterer back in Playful Math 106. (That time, the caterer was serving pizza.) So here’s a bonus activity we’ve never done before…
The first several stages of a pattern are as follows:
This pattern sequence was named clock binary by its creator, noelements-setempty.
Many parents remember struggling to learn math. We hope to provide a better experience for our children.
And one of the best ways for children to enjoy learning is through hands-on play.
This game features the Cuisenaire rods, but you may play with any math manipulative based on length: Montessori bead chains, Mortensen or Math-U-See blocks, etc. Or draw pictures on graph paper.
Math Concepts: partitions, part/whole, addition, multiplication, algebra.
Players: two or more.
Equipment: Cuisenaire rods (or other math manipulatives) or graph paper, pencil and paper (optional).
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 