My high school class ended the year with a review of multiplying and factoring simple polynomials. We played this matching game, and then I gave them a puzzle worksheet. I liked this idea, but I didn’t like the decoded answer. In my opinion, puzzles should give the student a “reward” for solving them — maybe a joke or riddle or something — but that answer seemed almost like nagging.
So I changed things around to make my own version:
[Photo by Alex Kehr.]
Welcome to the Math Teachers At Play blog carnival — which is not just for math teachers! If you like to learn new things and play around with ideas, you are sure to find something of interest. Let the mathematical fun begin…
WordPress.com bloggers have a new toy: the ability to embed TED talks…
[Photo by Betsssssy.]
Tom DeRosa of I Want to Teach Forever told me that he would love to have homeschool teachers or unschoolers contribute to his 52 Weeks, 52 Teachers Project. Just write a short response to the question:
Continue reading Calling Homeschoolers: Teaching Advice Wanted
[Photo by Untitled blue.]
Or don’t you know that all of us
who were baptized into Christ Jesus
were baptized into his death?We were therefore buried with him
through baptism into death in order that,
just as Christ was raised from the dead
through the glory of the Father,
we too may live a new life.
[Photo by daveduke.]
You see, at just the right time,
when we were still powerless,
Christ died for the ungodly.Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man,
though for a good man
someone might possibly dare to die.But God demonstrates his own love for us in this:
While we were still sinners,
Christ died for us.
[Photo by miss karen.]
Need to pass that math test? Better stock up on chocolate. According to a recent study:
Mental arithmetic became easier after volunteers had been given large amounts of compounds found in chocolate… They were also less likely to feel tired or mentally drained…
[Hat tip: Joanne Jacobs.]
My daughter Kitten strongly dislikes math when forced to do it on her own, so I am trying to get back into the habit of doing “Buddy-Style Math” with her. We take turns working the problems in her workbook: mine, hers, mine, hers, and so on down the page. We work each problem out loud, explaining how we got the answer and checking each other as we go.
In a way, it is like Charlotte Mason-style narration applied to math, since my daughter has to process her thoughts in order to explain how she worked the problem, which fixes the math concepts more deeply in her mind.
Continue reading Buddy-Style Math: Doing Homework Without Tears
[Photo by singsing_sky.]
The new math carnival is up and running at Homeschool Bytes:
There is a wide variety of articles, ranging from the “baby steps” of kindergarten math to the hurdle races of high school Check it out!
My homeschool co-op classes had a lot of fun creating this April calendar to hand out at our end-of-semester party on Friday. It’s not as easy to read as a traditional calendar — it is more like a puzzle. The expression in each square simplifies to that day’s date, so families can treat each day like a mini-review quiz: “Do you remember how to calculate this?”
Download your own copy:
If you’ve been wanting to start your own math club, you will find plenty of helpful ideas here:
Check out my May Math Calendar post for more ideas about how to use these puzzles.
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Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!
“April Math Calendar” copyright © 2009 by Denise Gaskins.
