Photo by ninjapoodles.
Do you and your students have trouble keeping track of those pesky English/American measurements? Here is a great visual showing the relationship between common volumes:
Math Games by Kids
Photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.
The cold came back and knocked me flat, but there are compensations. The downtime gave me a chance to browse my overflowing bookmarks folder, and I found something to add to my resource page. Princess Kitten and I enjoyed exploring these games and quizzes from Ambleweb.
Backwards Math
Photo by Complicated.
Princess Kitten is recovering from her cold and getting some energy back. She came to me and said wistfully, “I wish I could do backwards math.”
I looked up from my keyboard. “Backwards math? What do you mean?”
“Umm. It’s kinda hard to explain, but I can show you.”
Happy Pi Day II
[Feature photo above by pauladamsmith.]
Now there is an ancient Greek letter,
And I think no other is better.
It isn’t too tall,
It might look very small,
But its digits, they go on forever.— Scott
Mrs. Mitchell’s Virtual School
Time to Celebrate
Are your students doing anything special for 
If you need ideas, here are some great
Planning Ahead: St. Patrick’s Day
Photo by Brittany G.
I found this cute lesson on Meeyauw’s blog:
And that sent me searching for more St. Patrick’s Day math:
If Your Kids Like Sir Cumference…
If you and your students have enjoyed the Sir Cumference picture book series, then you will love these two worksheets from Waltzing Matilda:
[Hat tip: Living and Loving Numbers forum.]
How Should We Teach Arithmetic?
Dave Marain of MathNotations is running a poll about how to teach multiplication, but the question has broader application:
How should we teach the arithmetic algorithms
— or should we teach them at all?
Algorithms are step-by-step methods for doing something. In arithmetic, we have standard algorithms for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and long division. Once the student masters the steps for any particular algorithm, he can follow the steps to a correct answer without ever thinking about what the numbers mean.
Euclid’s Game on a Hundred Chart
Math concepts: subtraction within 100, number patterns, mental math
Number of players: 2 or 3
Equipment: printed hundred chart (also called a hundred board), and highlighter or translucent disks to mark numbers — or use this online hundred chart
Set Up
Place the hundred chart and highlighter where all players can reach them.
How to Play
- Allow the youngest player choice of moving first or second; in future games, allow the loser of the last game to choose.
- The first player chooses a number from 1 to 100 and marks that square on the hundred chart.
- The second player chooses and marks any other number.
- On each succeeding turn, the player subtracts any two marked numbers to find and mark a difference that has not yet been taken.
- Play alternates until no more numbers can be marked.
Puzzles for the New Year
As we all head back to school, here are some interesting calendar puzzles:
- 2008 is a leap year. Why do leap years happen? If we didn’t add a leap day every so often, would January eventually come in the summer?
- Today is Thursday. What day of the week will it be exactly one year from today?
- January 1, 2008, came on a Tuesday. When will be the next year that begins on Tuesday?
- My birthday (in March) lands on a Monday this year. When is the next year my birthday will come on a Monday? How about YOUR birthday — when is the next time it will happen on the same day of the week as this year?
- Can you find a pattern in the way dates move from one day of the week to another, year after year?
Christmas Math Puzzles and Activities
UPDATE: Some of the links below have gone missing, as internet sites tend to do. Check out my *huge* new blog post:
We interrupt our regularly scheduled math program to bring you the following Christmas links…
First, A to Z Home’s Cool offers some fun for older students and teachers:
- An Engineer Calculates Santa’s Trip
- 14 Days of Homeschooling and other Holiday Jokes
- The math blog 360 posts some more advanced Christmas fun here and here.
Also check out the annual Price of Christmas Index to see what the “12 Days of Christmas” gifts would cost you this year. Or explore the Nrich Advent Math Calendars to play with a new math activity every day until Christmas.
You can find just the song here: http://vihart.com/music/gauss12days.mp3.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 