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:
Enjoy!
A bit of April Fool’s Day fun from Google Maps:
Kitten and I have been slogging through the decimals chapter in AoPS Pre-Algebra. She hates arithmetic, so I tried skipping ahead to the algebra puzzle in the exercises, but she refused to be taken in: a decimal problem with an x in it is still a decimal problem.
So I let her off early and pointed her toward these logical “algebra” puzzles instead:
If we want to teach our children to think mathematically, we need to model and encourage asking questions. For instance:
What questions does the video inspire for you? I’d love to hear your comments!
Make your own “Happy Math Day” sign:
Here’s a fun activity for any age that will encourage your children to play with numbers:
From Visually.
Due to an apparent glitch with the submissions, it’s a frustratingly short carnival this month. But you will still find plenty of fun, from elementary kitchen math to algebra 2 and fractions to fractals:
The number sixty happens to be the smallest number divisible by the numbers 1 to 6. Also, it has the honour being a unitary perfect number, i.e. it can be interpreted as being the overall sum of its unitary divisors (excluding itself). Give this a try to convince yourself: 1 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 12 + 15 + 20 indeed equals 60.
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Click here to read the math carnival post.
After teaching co-op math classes for several years, I’ve become known as the local math maven. Upon meeting one of my children, fellow homeschoolers often say, “Oh, you’re Denise’s son/daughter? You must be really good at math.”
The kids do their best to smile politely — and not to roll their eyes until the other person has turned away.
I hear similar comments after teaching a math workshop: “Wow, your kids must love math!” But my children are individuals, each with his or her own interests. A couple of them enjoy an occasional geometry or logic puzzle, but they never voluntarily sit down to slog through a math workbook page.
In fact, one daughter expressed the depth of her youthful perfectionist angst by scribbling all over the cover of her Miquon math workbook:
Translation: “If I can’t do it flawlessly the first time, then I don’t want to do it at all.”
Continue reading How to Recognize a Successful Homeschool Math Program
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 