Do you sometimes mourn (in a small way) the loss of a favorite website? I still miss the Daily Set puzzle, which was part of my morning routine for years.
But lately, I’ve added a new teaser to wake up my brain for the day.
While Set was a visual-logic puzzle, this one is straightforward (though not simple) deduction. I think you’ll enjoy it.
“Problems stressing deduction rather than calculation have a special appeal and value. They teach you to analyze, and to seek unorthodox ways of solving a problem.”
—Boris Kordemsky
Today I’m sharing a few treats from The Moscow Puzzles by Boris Kordemsky, which mixes classic brainteasers and original stumpers.
Recreational math expert Martin Gardner called Kordemsky’s book “the outstanding puzzle collection in the history of Russian mathematics.”
Have fun playing logic with your kids!
Do you have math dreams for your children?
Here are some dreams shared the authors of Avoid Hard Work!
One of my favorite things as a teacher was to gather a group of children to play math together.
Call it a math club or math circle, the name didn’t matter, but the activity was always fun. We did non-schooly games and projects, and the kids enjoyed both the camaraderie and the experience of thinking hard in a stress-free setting.
If you’d like to pull together a math club/circle of your own, here are some tips.
Today’s puzzle involves an unusual teacher trying to collect students to participate in a group activity…
Puzzles can be fun ways to idle away a stormy afternoon. Or they can be doorways into the world of math, invitations to explore.
And puzzles are great for teaching, too!
Here is a puzzle from a master of mathematical ingenuity…
Recently, I stumbled on an old blog post featuring Singapore Math problems, and it brought back memories.
Back when my children were young, the original Primary Math series from Singapore was one of my favorite math curricula. I tweaked our school program constantly, so none of my kids had the same education, but three of them spent a good part of their elementary years in those books.
And I followed the Math in Singapore 2007 blog for its single season of publication. The blog has gone the way of many others, preserved only in the Internet Archive.
In the post I re-discovered, Patsy Wang-Iverson was reporting on a week-long seminar organized by Celine Koh, who offered the following problems (adapted from school exams and study books) for teacher discussion.
How many can you solve?
In the first section of George Lenchner’s Creative Problem Solving in School Mathematics, Lechner poses this problem. If you have seen it before, be patient — his point was much more than simply counting blocks.
A wooden cube that measures 3 cm along each edge is painted red. The painted cube is then cut into 1-cm cubes as shown below. How many of the 1-cm cubes do not have red paint on any face?
And then he challenges us as teachers:
11 Years Ago This Month…
My book business had been on hiatus for nearly 15 years, as I focused on homeschooling five children. I posted on forums and blogged off and on, but the old books fell into (not entirely undeserved) oblivion.
Now my older kids were moving out into their adult lives, and I’d begun to think about publishing again. I dusted off the old manuscripts to see what could be salvaged and began my adventure of indie publishing.
And all the gurus agreed, every author needed an email newsletter.
Share a playful math activity every month? Sure I could do that!
So while I revised and edited the manuscript for Let’s Play Math, to be published in paperback that fall, I launched my first “Playful Math” email, with an idea that’s still fun all these years later: Play math on your calendar.
Now that we’re a few months into the year, many of our New Near’s resolutions have probably fallen by the wayside. It’s inevitable, according to Mark Twain, that we shall “cast our reformation to the winds and go to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.”
But there is one resolution that I enjoy keeping—the resolve to play more math.
My favorite way to celebrate at any time of the year is by playing the Year Game. It’s a prime opportunity for players of all ages to fulfill the two most popular resolutions: spending more time with family and friends, and getting more exercise.
So grab a partner, slip into your workout clothes, and pump up those mental muscles!
One of the stretch goals for my Charlotte Mason’s Living Math Kickstarter campaign is to add a math journaling prompt to the end of each chapter. So, I’ve been playing around with ideas to get readers writing.
Since the book’s all about how to build mathematical reasoning, I’m looking for ways to prompt creative thinking and flexibility in math calculations.
I found some fun ideas in Guy Gattegno and Martin Hoffman’s Handbook of Activities for the Teaching of Mathematics (which you can download here), including the following riff off a puzzle created by Lewis Carroll.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 