In 1876, a politician made mathematical history. James Abram Garfield, the honorable Congressman from Ohio, published a brand new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem in The New England Journal of Education. He concluded, “We think it something on which the members of both houses can unite without distinction of party.”
[Photo by geishaboy500 via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).]
Are you looking for creative ways to help your children study math? Even without a workbook or teacher’s manual, your kids can learn a lot about numbers. Just spend an afternoon playing around with a hundred chart (also called a hundred board or hundred grid).
My free 50-page PDF Hundred Charts Galore! printables file features 1–100 charts, 0–99 charts, bottom’s-up versions, multiple-chart pages, blank charts, game boards, and more. Everything you need to play the activities below and those in my new 70+ Things to Do with a Hundred Chart book.
Download Free “Hundred Charts Galore!” Printables
Shop for “70+ Things To Do with a Hundred Chart” Book
And now, let’s play…
Pre-algebra students stand at the threshold of adventure. Behind them lie the rocky plains of school arithmetic. Ahead, the trail winds into a murky, tangled woods and disappears in the shadows. Who knows what monsters might live in a place like that?
Actress and math maven Danica McKellar has traveled through the pre-algebra jungle and beyond, up the slopes to higher math. She survived the journey, and now, on the heels of her bestselling book for math-phobic middle schoolers, she has written Kiss My Math to guide uncertain students along their way.
Unlike the case with most Hollywood movies, this sequel is an improvement.
[Photo by FXR [aka Soundz’FX].]
Our homeschool co-op classes start today, and I’m not ready. I never am. Life keeps going, anyway.
[Photo by *clairity*.]
Have you ever noticed how very different little girls are from little boys, in the way they play and in the way they think about things? Princess Kitten has been playing around with Backwards Math again, and my first thought was, “None of my boys would ever have done this with numbers.”
We’ve all heard the saying, Don’t judge a book by its cover, but I did it anyway. Well, not by the cover, exactly — I also flipped through the table of contents and read the short introduction. And I said to myself, “I don’t talk like this. I don’t let my kids talk like this. Why should I want to read a book that talks like this? I’ll leave it to the public school kids, who are surely used to worse.”
Okay, I admit it: I’m a bit of a prude. And it caused me to miss out on a good book. But now Danica McKellar‘s second book is out, and the first one has been released in paperback. A friendly PR lady emailed to offer me a couple of review copies, so I gave Math Doesn’t Suck a second chance.
I’m so glad I did.
In the treasure-hunting game of Geocaching (pronounced “geo-cashing”), players use GPS systems to locate boxes hidden at different geographical locations across the country.
Now, the creative people at Mathbits.com have come up with an online treasure-hunting activity for junior high and high school students, called MathCaching. Students solve mathematical problems to find hidden “boxes” on the Internet. Each box reveals clues to the location of the next one.
The MathCaching game covers pre-algebra through trigonometry topics, with calculus levels under development. For more information, visit the MathCaching site, or read the post on my Frugal Homeschooling blog.
[Photo by striatic.]
Maybe it’s because school is out for the summer, but there don’t seem to be all that many Olympics-related math resources on the Web. I did find one cool game, however, and a nice stack of word problems. I hope you enjoy them!
Update: Be sure to see my blog post Olympic Logic for more links and puzzles!
If you teach elementary children, check out this read-aloud math history resource from Homeschool Freebie of the Day:
[This download is available for one day only. If you missed it, see the end of this post for other ways to get the book.]
“These are the stories that were really told in the crisp autumn evenings, the Story Teller sitting by the fire that burned in the great fireplace in the cottage by the sea. These are the stories as he told them to the Tease and the rest of the circle of friends known as the Crowd. Sitting by the fire and listening to the stories, in the lights and shadows of the dancing flames they could see the forms of Ching and Lugal and all the rest with their curious dress of long ago…”
Continue reading Free Math History: Number Stories of Long Ago
[Photo by Reenie-Just Reenie.]
In honor of my Google searchers, to demonstrate the power of bar diagrams to model ratio problems, and just because math is fun…
Eccentric Aunt Ethel leaves her Christmas tree up year ’round, but she changes the decorations for each passing season. This July, Ethel wanted a patriotic theme of flowers, ribbons, and colored lights.
When she stretched out her three light strings (100 lights each) to check the bulbs, she discovered that several were broken or burned-out. Of the lights that still worked, the ratio of red bulbs to white ones was 7:3. She had half as many good blue bulbs as red ones. But overall, she had to throw away one out of every 10 bulbs.
How many of each color light bulb did Ethel have?
Before reading further, pull out some scratch paper. How would you solve this problem? How would you teach it to a middle school student?
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 