In Response To
- David Coffey’s What’s the point?
Make your own “Happy Math Day” sign:
Here’s a fun activity for any age that will encourage your children to play with numbers:
2013 Mathematics Game
feature photo above by Alan Klim via flickr
New Year’s Day
Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time.
However, go in, community. New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.
— Mark Twain
Letter to Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, Jan. 1863
For many homeschoolers, January is the time to assess our progress and make a few New Semester’s Resolutions. This year, we resolve to challenge ourselves to more math puzzles. Would you like to join us? Pump up your mental muscles with the 2013 Mathematics Game!
Vi Hart: Snowflakes, Starflakes, and Swirlflakes
Vi Hart is back with some wintery fun!
A Mathematical Advent Calendar
It’s always a challenge to keep up with homeschooling during the holiday season, but here’s a wonderful way to weave mathematics into your daily schedule: The Nrich Advent Calendars offer a fun math game or activity for every day in December until Christmas Eve. Click the image to visit the calendar that fits your student’s level.
Advent Calendar 2012 – Primary
Advent Calendar 2012 – Secondary
Welcome, TIME Readers!
[Photo by Luis Argerich via flickr.]
If you’ve come here from Bonnie Rochman’s article, Bedtime Math: A Problem a Day Keeps Fear of Arithmetic Away, thank you for dropping in! I have nearly 800 published posts about learning and teaching math, which can seem pretty overwhelming.
Here are a few good places to start:
- Tell Me a (Math) Story
What better way could there be to do math than snuggled up on a couch with your little one, or side by side at the sink while your middle-school student helps you wash the dishes, or passing the time on a car ride into town?
- Homeschooling with Math Anxiety Series
Our childhood struggles with schoolwork gave most of us a warped view of mathematics. Yet even parents who suffer from math anxiety can learn to enjoy math with their children.
- 20 Best Math Games and Puzzles
Arithmetic games for elementary and middle school students, and geometric puzzles for middle and high school.
- How to Conquer the Times Table
Challenge your student to a joint experiment in mental math. Over the next two months, without flashcards or memory drill, how many math facts can the two of you learn together? We will use the world’s oldest interactive game — conversation — to explore multiplication patterns while memorizing as little as possible.
I hope you enjoy your visit to my blog.
HexaFlexaParty This Weekend!
Sunday, October 21, is the worldwide hexaflexagon party in honor of Martin Gardner’s birthday. Gardner’s article about hexaflexagons launched his career as a recreational math guru who inspired people all around the world to love math.
Here’s how to join in the fun:
Hexaflexagon History
Nrich: Math Puzzles and More
Nrich recently updated their amazing website. I love exploring their backlog of puzzles and games — what a mother lode of resources for math club or a homeschool co-op class!
Sample The Moscow Puzzles
Dover Publications is offering a free sample chapter from The Moscow Puzzles.
Cat and Mice
Purrer has decided to take a nap. He dreams he is encircle by 13 mice: 12 gray and 1 white. He hears his owner saying: “Purrer, you are to eat each thirteenth mouse, keeping the same direction. The last mouse you eat must be the white one.”
More Free Math from Dover Publications
How Crazy Can You Make It?
And here is yet more fun from Education Unboxed. This type of page was always one of my my favorites in Miquon Math.
Update:
Handmade “How Crazy…?” worksheets are wonderful, but if you want something a tad more polished, I created a printable. The first page has a sample number, and the second is blank so that you can fill in any target:
Add an extra degree of freedom: students can fill in the blanks with equivalent and non-equivalent expressions. Draw lines anchoring the ones that are equivalent to the target number, but leave the non-answers floating in space.
Or don’t draw lines. Let the kids create a worksheet for you to solve. After they finish their expressions, can you figure out which ones connect to the target number?
Olympic Logic
I love logic puzzles! Nrich Maths offers four fun Olympics Logic puzzles. And be sure to check out the rest of their Nrich Olympics Math as well.
Medals Count
Given the following clues, can you work out the number of gold, silver and bronze medals that France, Italy and Japan got in this international sports competition?
- Japan has 1 more gold medal, but 3 fewer silver medals, than Italy.
- France has the most bronze medals (18), but fewest gold medals (7).
- Each country has at least 6 medals of each type.
- Italy has 27 medals in total.
- Italy has 2 more bronze medals than gold medals.
- The three countries have 38 bronze medals in total.
- France has twice as many silver medals as Italy has gold medals.
