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.
Photo by Drab Makyo.
I have a huge, long-neglected bookmarks folder labeled “To add to resource page.” I am never going to find time to sort and review all of those links. But if I post a few at random now and then, perhaps you will find something useful.
So here are five new links I am adding to my Free (mostly) math resources on the Internet page.
Photo by ccarlstead.
Congratulations, math team! All your hard work paid off, and I hope you enjoyed yourselves thoroughly. Of course, as C. S. Lewis wrote:
…if you do one good deed, your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.
Now it’s time to practice for the state level in March. You can find practice problems online at:
Preparation Drills for MATHCOUNTS
or
The “Go Figure!” math challenge
[ACK! MathCounts has re-written their website. The old link is no longer any good, but I haven’t yet found the new location for this game.]
And give the new interactive Countdown Round game a try:
Click over to Teen Literacy Tips for this fun vocabulary puzzle:
Wow! The Carnival of Homeschooling has reached the 100 mark with this week’s edition at Mom Is Teaching [blog has disappeared]. It doesn’t seem that long ago that Why Homeschool posted the very first CoH. We’ve had an interesting couple of years, full of enlightening, entertaining, and encouraging blog posts. If you’d like to browse, the CoH archive is here.
Continue reading Carnival of Homeschooling Centennial Edition
Here are a couple of interesting articles about teaching math:
Math Trek (Nov. 10, 2007) — Spinning a good yarn may seem to have little to do with mathematics, but a new study suggests otherwise. Preschoolers who tell stories that include many different perspectives do better in math two years later than those who stick to one simple perspective. The researchers believe that the study may highlight a deep connection between mathematical ability and narrative skills… [Hat tip: Wild About Math!]
Gesturing Helps Grade School Children Solve Math Problems
ScienceDaily (Nov. 5, 2007) — Are math problems bugging your kids? Tell them to talk back — using their hands. Psychologists at the University of Chicago report that gesturing can help kids add new and correct problem-solving strategies to their mathematical repertoires. What’s more, when given later instruction, kids who are told to gesture are more likely to succeed on math problems…
And since this is supposedly a teaching blog, here are some “educational” links:
My elementary Math Club students had fun practicing their math facts and “out of the box” thinking with Hexa-Trex puzzles. The object of Hexa-Trex is to find a path through all the number and operation tiles to make a true equation. The “Easy” puzzles are just the right level for my 4th-5th grade students, although they get stumped whenever the equations require Order of Operations. One girl enjoyed the puzzles enough to take our extra pages home for her dad.
Hexa-Trex puzzles were featured in the October issue of Games magazine, and now you can enjoy Hexa-Trex away from the computer with Bogusia Gierus‘s new book, The First Book of Hexa-Trex Puzzles. If you are thinking ahead to Christmas (can it be that time already?!), and if you have a puzzle lover in the family, this little book would make a fun stocking-stuffer.
What can you do when you are stumped? Too many students sit and stare at the page, waiting for inspiration to strike — and when the solution doesn’t crack their heads open and step out, fully formed, they complain: “Math is too hard!”
So this year I have given my Math Club students a couple of mini-posters to put up on the wall above their desk, or wherever they do their math homework. The first gives four questions to ask yourself as you think through a math problem, and the second is a list of problem-solving strategies.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 