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Blog Carnival Update

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

It seems like a corrolary to Murphy’s Law: Whenever I claim that the blog carnival site is working, it immediately goes on the blink. At any rate, I can’t get the site to load at all today. If you want to send in a post for the next math carnival, you can:

Everyone is welcome — if you’ve written a blog post about learning, teaching, or just playing around with math, from preschool to calculus, please send us your link!

epic fail photos - WIN: That's One Emotional Math Test

Purple Comet! Math Meet

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

The 2012 Purple Comet! Math Meet is a free, on-line, team competition for middle and high school students around the world. Every team needs an adult supervisor. Homeschoolers are welcome and should register under the Mixed Team category.

Register now. The contest will run Tuesday, April 17, through Thursday, April 26, 2012. That gives your team plenty of time for practice sessions between now and then.

What I’m Reading: Fermat’s Enigma

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Homeschooling is much more than just doing school at home — it’s a lifelong lifestyle of learning. And thanks to the modern miracle of inter-library loan, even those of us who live in the middle of nowhere can get just about any book sent directly to our tiny home-town libraries.

As I mentioned in Math Teachers at Play 46, I’m trying to add more living books about math to our homeschool schedule, including my own self-education reading. So, a copy of Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem finally showed up at my library, and I am thoroughly enjoying it.

Continue reading What I’m Reading: Fermat’s Enigma

Math Teachers at Play #47 via Math Hombre

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Welcome to the 47th edition of the Math Teachers at Play Blog Carnival!
http://bit.ly/MTAP47

The Number Dictionary reveals two particularly interesting facts about 47.

  • 47 is a prime and a Gaussian prime.
  • 47 is the difference between two squares.

…
I don’t think I’ve appreciated 47 nearly enough before this carnival. But we should move on since there are a lot of neat entries this month…

Go read MTaP 47 at Math Hombre –>

Do You Teach Math to Young Children?

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Sue VanHattum is trying to convince the publishers that this excellent book would reach a wider audience if they made it available at a lower price. What do you think?

As anyone who has taught or raised young children knows, mathematical education for little kids is a real mystery. What are they capable of? What should they learn first? How hard should they work? Should they even “work” at all? Should we push them, or just let them be?

There are no correct answers to these questions, and Zvonkin deals with them in classic math-circle style: He doesn’t ask and then answer a question, but shows us a problem — be it mathematical or pedagogical — and describes to us what happened. His book is a narrative about what he did, what he tried, what worked, what failed, but most important, what the kids experienced.

This book is not a guidebook. It does not purport to show you how to create precocious high achievers. It is just one person’s story about things he tried with a half-dozen young children. On the other hand, if you are interested in running a math circle, or homeschooling children, you will find this book to be an invaluable, inspiring resource. It’s not a “how to” manual as much as a “this happened” journal. … Just about every page contains a really clever teaching idea, a cool math problem, and an inspiring and funny story.

— Paul Zeitz
Introduction to Math from Three to Seven

Super Bowl XLVI Math Worksheet and Football Comic

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Lance Friedman of MathPlane.com has posted two bits of fun in honor of Super Bowl XLVI. (Click the images to go to Lance’s site.) And if you’re a homeschooler, Currclick is offering a Super Bowl Mini-Helper free this week.

NFL Math Quiz

Continue reading Super Bowl XLVI Math Worksheet and Football Comic

Fibonacci Numbers and Plants

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Have you ever wondered why so many plants grow in Fibonacci Numbers? Vi Hart offers a great explanation (with hands-on activities) in these three videos — and she introduces a new species called the slugcat, which my daughter thinks is adorable.

Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant [1 of 3]

Continue reading Fibonacci Numbers and Plants

Math Teachers at Play #46: Living Books for Math

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Welcome to the Math Teachers At Play blog carnival — which is not just for math teachers! Here is a smorgasbord of ideas for learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to pre-college. Some articles were submitted by their authors, others were drawn from the immense backlog in my blog reader. If you like to learn new things, you are sure to find something of interest.

Living Books for Math

A child’s intercourse must always be with good books, the best that we can find… We must put into their hands the sources which we must needs use for ourselves, the best books of the best writers.
…
For the mind is capable of dealing with only one kind of food; it lives, grows and is nourished upon ideas only; mere information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body.

— Charlotte Mason
Toward A Philosophy of Education

Princess Kitten and I took a longer than usual holiday break from homeschooling, but now I’m in plan-for-the-new-semester mode. I hope to include more living math in our schedule, so I decided to illustrate this edition of the MTaP carnival with a few of my favorite living math books. I’d love to hear more living book suggestions in the comments!

If you click on a book cover, the links take you to Amazon.com, where you can read reviews and other details (and where I earn a small affiliate commission if you actually buy the book), but all of these books should be available through your public library or via inter-library loan.

Let the mathematical fun begin…

Continue reading Math Teachers at Play #46: Living Books for Math