The new Math Teachers at Play blog carnival is up for your browsing pleasure. Featured articles include activities and enrichment from preschool through high school:
As we were doing Buddy Math (taking turns through the homework exercises) today, my daughter said, “Oooo! I want to do this one. It’s pretty!”
She has always loved seeing patterns in math. I remember once, years ago, when she insisted that we change the problems on a worksheet to make the answers come out symmetrical. 🙂
The Math Teachers at Play blog carnival is a monthly blogging round-up shared at a different blog each month, featuring posts from parents, teachers, homeschoolers, and students — anyone who is interested in playing around with school-level (preschool to pre-college) or recreational math.
This month’s edition is ready for your browsing pleasure:
Welcome to my humble online abode! Take a seat – I’ve lost the carnival number under a chunk of paperwork. Whoops…
Wait, you might be able to help me out! Would you like to help me out?
The following sequences contain the missing carnival number – I’m a bit stuck, and I need your help!
Can you tell me what the next number is? There’s a prize!
I had a fight with Euclid on the nature of the primes.
It got a little heated – you know how the tension climbs.
It started out most civil, with a honeyed cup of tea;
we traded tales of scholars, like Descartes and Ptolemy.
But as the tea began to cool, our chatter did as well.
We’d had our fill of gossip. We sat silent for a spell.
That’s when Euclid turned to me, and said, “Hear this, my friend:
did you know the primes go on forever, with no end?” …
Here is yet another wonderful summer math opportunity for homeschoolers or anyone who works with kids: a free, 3-week mini-course on math problem solving for all ages.
The course is being organized by Dr. James Tanton, Dr. Maria Droujkova, and Yelena McManaman. The course participants include families, math clubs, playgroups, and other small circles casually exploring adventurous mathematics with kids of any age.
Would you like to join us? Check out the mpsMOOC13 home page for instructions. The deadline for joining is July 7 July 3.
I love using rectangles as a model for multiplication. In this video, Mike & son offer a pithy demonstration of WHY a negative number times a negative number has to come out positive:
It reminds me of string art designs, but the app makes it easy to vary the pattern and see what happens.
What do your students notice about the patterns?
What questions can they ask?
I liked the way the app uses “minutes” as the unit that describes the star you want the program to draw. That makes it easier (for me, at least) to notice and understand the patterns, since minutes are a more familiar and intuitive unit than degrees, let alone radians.
Here’s an interesting summer learning opportunity for homeschooling parents and classroom teachers alike. Stanford Online is offering a free summer course from math education professor and author Jo Boaler:
During off-times, at a long stoplight or in grocery store line, when the kids are restless and ready to argue for the sake of argument, I invite them to play the numbers game.
“Can you tell me how to get to twelve?”
My five year old begins, “You could take two fives and add a two.”
“Take sixty and divide it into five parts,” my nearly-seven year old says.
“You could do two tens and then take away a five and a three,” my younger son adds.
Eventually we run out of options and they begin naming numbers. It’s a simple game that builds up computational fluency, flexible thinking and number sense. I never say, “Can you tell me the transitive properties of numbers?” However, they are understanding that they can play with numbers.
…
photo by Mike Baird via flickr
I didn’t learn the rules of baseball by filling out a packet on baseball facts. Nobody held out a flash card where, in isolation, I recited someone else’s definition of the Infield Fly Rule. I didn’t memorize the rules of balls, strikes, and how to get someone out through a catechism of recitation.
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