Check out the new playful math education carnival at eat play math blog. Math art, tessellations, review games, problem-solving challenges, and all sorts of mathy fun. Not to mention, Raspberry Tiramisu!
Welcome to the Math Teachers at Play #99 Blog Carnival, a monthly smorgasbord of links to bloggers all around the internet who have great ideas for learning, teaching, and playing around with math…
Click here to go read the carnival blog!
Guest post by Emily Grosvenor.
June 17 marks World Tessellation Day, a holiday I created to bring awareness to the fun of finding and making tessellations.
Will you celebrate with us?
Here are 10 great ways to play with tessellations, learn about them, and introduce your children to a math concept that opens a variety of creative learning opportunities.
A tessellation is a tiled mosaic pattern of the same shape laid out over and over again, repeating into infinity. Tessellations can be found in nature, or they can be created by people. Learn more at these websites:
Except where otherwise noted, graphics and photos copyright ©2016 Emily Grosvenor. All rights reserved.
Continue reading 10 Ways to Celebrate World Tessellation Day
“My oldest son has somehow developed the horrid habit of counting on his fingers. We worked on the math facts all summer. He knows the answers in simple form, such as 9 + 4, but if it’s in a bigger problem like 249 + 54, he counts up to add or counts down to subtract, all using fingers. My younger children have no problem with mental math, but he can’t seem to get it. Are there any tips or tricks to stop this?”
Counting on fingers is not a horrid habit, it is a crutch. Please think for a moment about the purpose of crutches. The blasted things are an uncomfortable nuisance, but there are times when you can’t get anywhere without them. And if you need them, it does you no good for a friend to insist you should crawl along on your own.
That is how your son feels right now about his fingers. He is struggling with something his younger siblings find easy, and he can tell that you are frustrated. His confidence is broken, in a cast, and needs time for healing. So he falls back on what he knows he can do, counting up the answer.
Think positive: this means he still believes that math ought to make sense — that to understand what he is doing is more important than to guess at an answer. You want him to value sense-making, because otherwise he will try to memorize his way through middle school and high school math. That is the road to disaster.
Don’t you love this quotation?
For our children, we dream that mathematics…
… makes sense
… is more than just arithmetic
… is joyous
… makes them strong
… is meaningful
… is creative
… is full of fascinating questions
… opens up many paths to solutions
… is friendly
… solves big problems and makes the world better
… is a powerful tool they can master
… is beautiful
… lets them learn in their own ways
… is connected to their lives
… asks “why” and not just “how”
… opens the world
From the upcoming new book Avoid Hard Work by James Tanton and the Natural Math team.
Join the crowdfunding campaign and reserve your copy today!
I’ve loved James Tanton’s How to Be a Math Genius videos for years. He offers great problem-solving tips like:
Seriously, those are wonderful videos. If you haven’t seen them before, go check them out. Be sure to come back, though, because I’ve just heard some great news.
Tanton has joined up with the NaturalMath.com team of Maria Droujkova, Yelena McManaman, and Ever Salazar to put together a book for parents, teachers, math circle leaders, and anyone else who works with children ages 3–10.
It’s called Avoid Hard Work, and it takes a playful look at ten powerful problem-solving techniques.
For more details about Avoid Hard Work, including a 7-page pdf sample with tips and puzzles to enjoy, check out the crowdfunding page at Natural Math:
Read the questions and answers. Try the activities with your children. And donate to support playful math education!
“Worksheet problems make my daughter’s brain freeze. Even simple things such as “2 + ___ = 2″ confuse her. What can I do?”
Can your daughter do math if you put away the worksheet and ask her a real-life problem: “I have a lunch sack. I put two cookies into the sack, and then I give it to you. When you look into the sack, you see two cookies there. Can you tell me what was in the sack at the beginning, before I put my cookies in?”
Or can she solve problems when the answer isn’t zero? Could she figure out how many you started with if she saw four cookies when she looked in the sack?
The idea of having a number for “nothing” can seem strange to young children.
My May “Let’s Play Math” newsletter went out last week to everyone who signed up for Tabletop Academy Press math updates, and again early this morning to everyone who signed up in the last week of May. This month’s issue featured a peek at the printable math model cards for my upcoming game book Math You Can Play: Multiplication & Fractions, along with a preview game from the book.
If you’re a subscriber but didn’t see your newsletter, check your Updates or Promotions tab (in Gmail) or your Spam folder. And to make sure you get all the future newsletters, add “Denise at Tabletop Academy Press” [denise.gaskins @ tabletop academy press .com, without spaces] to your contacts or address book.
If you missed this month’s edition, no worries—there will be more playful math snacks coming soon. Click the link below to sign up today!
And remember: Newsletter subscribers are always the first to hear about new books, revisions, and sales or other promotions.
Check out the new playful math education carnival at Math Misery? blog. Multiplication, fractions, humor, problem-solving challenges, and all sorts of mathy fun:
So this is Math Teacher’s at Play … the 98th edition! You know what’s really interesting about 98? It’s 47×2. No, that’s clearly false. 49×2=98. That’s much better. Ok, so here’s a question, are there more facts about 98 than there are non-facts (aka lies) about 98 or the other way around or are they equal in cardinality?
. . .
Make sure to give a the articles linked here a visit!
Click here to go read the carnival post.
CREDITS: Feature photo by m01229 via Flickr (CC BY 2.0, text added).
I love it when a plan — or rather, a series of math thoughts — comes together.
On Monday, Emily Grosvenor (author of the Tessalation! picture book) asked me how parents who are insecure in math could help their children learn through play, and I responded with this quote from my Let’s Play Math book:
If you are intimidated by numbers, you can look for patterns of shape and color. Pay attention to how they grow. Talk about what your children notice.
But I wasn’t entirely satisfied with that answer. So many adults have come away from their own school experience thinking math is only numbers. Even with shapes, isn’t it the numbers about them — how many sides, what size of angles, calculate the the area or perimeter — that are important? That’s what school math tends to focus on.
Those of us who are comfortable with math know that there are many more things to notice and think about than just numbers. We know that it’s this noticing, thinking, and wondering that is at the heart of math. And that just playing with shapes can build a powerful foundation for future math learning.
And then yesterday, Malke Rosenfeld posted a beautiful article about a paper manipulative created by Paula Krieg. Which included this video:
The ability to create, and maintain, and manipulate shapes mentally — that’s the goal. Just like kids who can put numbers together in their heads, kids who can rotate, flip, and think of how shapes fit together in their heads have a powerful tool to analyze not only simple shape puzzles, but dividing up an area that’s a more complex room shape … to look at a piece of artwork … or look at a building … For these kids, all the world around becomes a playground to use mathematical ideas.
— Doug Clements
Problem Solving Development: Composing Shapes
Of course, pattern blocks are good for much more than just filling in worksheet pictures. But I love this peek into how a child’s understanding grows, in bits and spurts — without any numbers at all — until the world itself becomes a playground for mathematical ideas.
Want more?
You know what? Children like mathematics. Children see the world mathematically … When we do a puzzle, when we count things, when we see who’s got more, or who’s taller … Play and mathematics are not on opposite sides of the stage.
— Doug Clements
Why Early Childhood is the Right Time to Start Learning Math
Welcome to the 97th edition of the Math Teachers At Play math education blog carnival: a monthly 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.
A few articles were submitted by their authors, but most were drawn from the immense backlog in my rss reader. If you’d like to see your blog post featured next month, be sure to send it in yourself. Our hosts are busy parents and teachers who have limited time to scour the Internet for goodies.
To add a bit of color, I’ve thrown in several favorites from my newly updated Math with Living Books pages. Some (affiliate) links go to Amazon.com, where you can read descriptions and reviews — but there’s no need to buy. Most of these books should be available through your local library.
If you’d like to skip directly to your area of interest, click here:
Please: If you enjoy the carnival, would you consider volunteering to host sometime this year? Classroom teachers, homeschoolers, unschoolers, or anyone who likes to play around with math (even if the only person you “teach” is yourself) — if you would like to take a turn, please speak up!
And now, let the mathematical fun begin!
When the queen of her bugs demands that her army march in even lines, Private Joe divides the marchers into more and more lines so that he will not be left out of the parade.
Help inspire your kids to try writing their own unique problems. Includes a wide range of math topics and concepts: money and time, fractions, percentages, geometry, logic, and multi-step problem solving.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 