Bloglines Potluck “Carnival”

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Blog carnival graphic 2

One last, long weekend before we dive full-speed into school and co-op classes and swim lessons and karate and art lessons and…well, this may be my last chance to catch up on the backlog in my Bloglines folders.

With over 100 feeds, there is no way I will keep up with all of you during the school year. So here is my end-of-summer fling, a sort of unofficial “Best of (my) Bloglines” carnival, in which I share my personal favorites from the last few weeks of RSS.

I hope you enjoy these posts as much as I have.

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Trouble with Percents

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Can your students solve this problem?

There are 20% more girls than boys in the senior class.
What percent of the seniors are girls?

This is from a discussion of the semantics of percent problems and why students have trouble with them, going on over at MathNotations. (Follow-up post here.)

Our pre-algebra class just finished a chapter on percents, so I thought Chickenfoot might have a chance at this one. Nope! He leapt without thought to the conclusion that 60% of the class must be girls.

After I explained the significance of the word “than”, he solved the follow-up problem just fine.

Living with History

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Farm in winterMy daughter has been decorating the kitchen, and she decided to hang these old photos that came with the house. The frames needed repairs, so I took the opportunity to scan the photos. (Click for larger view.)

Family farmI wish I knew who the people were, or when the photos were taken. The house shows changes over the years. Eventually, the back porch was closed in to create a pantry and laundry room off the kitchen.

Horse cartThe horse cart picture has a date across one corner. It looks like 9/1908.

Pony trick

This young boy has taught his pony a trick: to step up on a box or something — I can’t quite see what.

Vintage carCan anyone identify this car? The boy looks sweet with a bouquet for his mother. I wonder if that’s her in the driver’s seat.

The Procrastinating Blogger Award

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.

— Don Marquis

Joyful Days kindly nominated me for the Thinking Blogger Award back in the days of the dinosaurs. Well, she isn’t that old, really — it was only last April. I am grateful to her for thinking of me, and ever since then I have been thinking deeply about whom to nominate in my turn. Or, to be more precise, I printed out the nomination post as a reminder, and then it got lost in a pile of “to sort/read/file” papers on a shelf under my desk…

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Welcome, Princess Kitten!

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Not to be outdone by her older brother, Princess Kitten insisted on starting a blog of her own:

Kitten’s Purring

I have given them a section of my blogroll. If you are interested, they would both love to have you drop by and read their stories. Chickenfoot is writing in the “fractured fairytale” vein, at least for now, while Kitten’s tales tend toward animal adventures.

This teacher’s opinion: It certainly beats those dreaded “Pretend you’re a pencil” essays!

More Math Resources

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

My math resources page continues to grow, with new discoveries and with pages I had simply overlooked. (Shame on me!) As I add new entries, I will occasionally post them on the blog as well. Like this:

1000 Problems to Enjoy
A large collection of challenge problems for grades 7-9, or for anyone who wants to play around with math and logic. Answers are in the Doc files, but don’t peek. Figure it out for yourself, and use the file only to check your work. It’s no fun when someone just gives you the answer!

Hexa-Trex Puzzle of the Day
“Object of the game: Find a path through all the tiles to make a math equation.” Difficulty ranges from easy to quite challenging.

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Free (Mostly) Math Resources on the Internet

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Please take a few minutes to look at my handy new math resource page (in the “For Your Information” box at the top of my sidebar). I moved all the math resource links from my sidebar onto a page of their own, where I could add descriptions and comments.

Whew! That was a lot of work. I hope you find it useful. If you know of any other great math pages I should add to the list, please tell me.