Lance Friedman of MathPlane.com has posted two bits of fun in honor of Super Bowl XLVI. (Click the images to go to Lance’s site.) And if you’re a homeschooler, Currclick is offering a Super Bowl Mini-Helper free this week.
Continue reading Super Bowl XLVI Math Worksheet and Football Comic
Have you ever wondered why so many plants grow in Fibonacci Numbers? Vi Hart offers a great explanation (with hands-on activities) in these three videos — and she introduces a new species called the slugcat, which my daughter thinks is adorable.
Welcome to the Math Teachers At Play blog carnival — which is not just for math teachers! Here is a smorgasbord of ideas for learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to pre-college. Some articles were submitted by their authors, others were drawn from the immense backlog in my blog reader. If you like to learn new things, you are sure to find something of interest.
A child’s intercourse must always be with good books, the best that we can find… We must put into their hands the sources which we must needs use for ourselves, the best books of the best writers.
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For the mind is capable of dealing with only one kind of food; it lives, grows and is nourished upon ideas only; mere information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body.
Princess Kitten and I took a longer than usual holiday break from homeschooling, but now I’m in plan-for-the-new-semester mode. I hope to include more living math in our schedule, so I decided to illustrate this edition of the MTaP carnival with a few of my favorite living math books. I’d love to hear more living book suggestions in the comments!
If you click on a book cover, the links take you to Amazon.com, where you can read reviews and other details (and where I earn a small affiliate commission if you actually buy the book), but all of these books should be available through your public library or via inter-library loan.
Let the mathematical fun begin…
Continue reading Math Teachers at Play #46: Living Books for Math
photo by Creativity103 via flickr
For our homeschool, January is the time to assess our progress and make a few New Semester’s Resolutions. This year, we resolve to challenge ourselves to more math puzzles. Would you like to join us? Pump up your mental muscles with the 2012 Mathematics Game!
Use the digits in the year 2012 to write mathematical expressions for the counting numbers 1 through 100.
- You must use all four digits. You may not use any other numbers.
- You may use +, -, x, ÷, sqrt (square root), ^ (raise to a power), ! (factorial), and parentheses, brackets, or other grouping symbols.
- You may use a decimal point to create numbers such as .2, .01, etc.
- You may create multi-digit numbers such as 10 or 202, but we prefer solutions that avoid them.
Bonus Rules
You may use the overhead-bar (vinculum), dots, or brackets to mark a repeating decimal.You may use multifactorials:
- n!! = a double factorial = the product of all integers from 1 to n that have the same parity (odd or even) as n.
- n!!! = a triple factorial = the product of all integers from 1 to n that are equal to n mod 3
[Note to teachers: Math Forum modified their rules to allow double factorials, but as far as I know, they do not allow repeating decimals or triple factorials.]
Board games are a celebration of problem solving, and problem solving is at the heart of a quality mathematics education… The mathematics might be hidden, but I guarantee you that it will be there.
— Gordon Hamilton, MathPickle.com
Commercial Games 8
Continue reading Build Problem-Solving Skills with Board Games
The Math Teachers at Play Carnival is up at Virtual Math Tutor for your browsing pleasure. Articles range from preschool to high school level in math, and topics include puzzles, worksheets, games, teaching tips, ideas for the math/science lover on your Christmas gift list, and the cutest math monster I’ve seen in ages. Great fun!
You can find just the song here: http://vihart.com/music/gauss12days.mp3.
Send in your submission for the Math Teachers at Play blog carnival by Wednesday night.
While you’re waiting for Friday’s carnival, check out the new Carnival of Mathematics.
These advent calendars feature a new math puzzle or game for each day of December until Christmas. Many of the activities are designed to be done in a group, but they work fine for home school families who play with math together. Enjoy!
In algebra 1, we spend a lot of time working with quadratic equations. Among other things, we want to know how many roots (solutions) an equation has and whether the roots are real or imaginary numbers.
One way to visualize this is by asking:
I wish my algebra teacher had explained it like James Tanton does. It makes so much sense!
Bogusia Gierus, host of this month’s Math Teachers at Play blog carnival, is offering to give away her First Book of Hexa-Trex Puzzles for just the cost of shipping. How generous!
My math club had fun with several of these puzzles a few years ago, and the “Easy” ones (like the sample shown here) were just right for my 4th-5th grade students. One girl enjoyed them enough that she took home extra copies to share with her father.
It’s a thin book, just the right size for a stocking-stuffer. To see the full range of difficulty levels, look over the puzzles on Bogusia’s Daily Hexa-Trex page. To get your own copy of the book, read the giveaway instructions on Bogusia’s blog.
Object of the Puzzle
The object of the puzzle is to find the equation pathway that leads through ALL the tiles.
Forming Equations
- Two or three (or four or five etc.) digit numbers are made up of the individual tiles in the particular order as the equation is read. For example 5 x 5 = 2 5 is correct, but read backwards 5 2 = 5 x 5 is incorrect.
- The equation must be continuous (no jumping over tiles or empty spaces).
- Each tile can be used ONLY ONCE.
- Order of operations is followed. Multiplication and division comes before addition and subtraction.
- The tile “-” can be used as both a subtraction operation or a negative sign in front of a digit, making it a negative number.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 