Education Unboxed has posted some playful addition games for young learners. And there’s much more on their website. Be sure to click around and explore!
Six is Having a Party! – Math Facts with Cuisenaire Rods
Math Teachers at Play #46: Living Books for Math
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.
Living Books for Math
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.
…
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
More Halloween Math
An Apollonian pumpkin patch and Sierpinski candy corn:
Great ideas for mathy porch decorations:
My favorite blood-thirsty online game from Murderous Maths:
And here’s some less-violent holiday math for the younger set:
Do you know of more mathy fall fun? Share your links in the comments section!
Easy-to-Make Counting Rope
This is wonderful! I am definitely not a crafts-person, but I can’t wait to make some of these. If I can just find my daughter’s pony beads….
From Cindy at love2learn2day, who got the idea from a math conference workshop by Kim Sutton.
Krista at the LivingMathForum wrote, “We’ve used these for several years. My son even made a bunch of them a few years ago and sold them at a homeschool resource fair. We always have one in most of our board games to help younger children add up their die rolls. I find them relaxing for some reason, just moving the beads along the cord, and my son will sometimes sit and listen to me reading, etc., and just manipulate the beads.”
Playful Math Lessons
You can use these math activities to play with your counting rope:
Sign Up for the MathCounts Club Program
The MathCounts Club Program provides enrichment activities and puzzles for 6th-8th grade math clubs within schools — and homeschool groups may join, too! Participants receive a free Club in a Box Resource Kit, which includes the Club Resource Guide, two game boards to accompany one of the meeting plans, 12 MathCounts pencils, and a MathCounts tote bag for the coach. (Apparently they had good intentions, but they didn’t follow through. My box had no tote.)
A school (or homeschool group) may choose to participate in the Club Program, the competition or both programs. Since these programs can complement each other, any school that registers for the MathCounts competition automatically gets the Club in a Box Resource Kit, too.
For more information, check out these links:
- Sample “Game and Puzzle Month” meeting plan
- Sample Silver Level Challenge problem set
- 2011-2012 MathCounts School Handbook
- MathCounts Problems of the Week
- Updated Eligibility Guidelines for Homeschools and Virtual Schools (competition program)
- Register online
Math Teachers at Play #39
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.
Several of these articles were submitted by the bloggers; others were drawn from my overflowing blog reader. Don’t try to skim everything all at once, but take the time to enjoy browsing. Savor a few posts today, and then come back for another helping tomorrow or next week.
Most of the photos below are from the 2010 MAA Found Math Gallery; click each image for more details. Quotations are from Mike Cook’s Canonical List of Math Jokes.
Let the mathematical fun begin…
Math Teachers at Play #35
Welcome to the Math Teachers At Play blog carnival — which is not just for math teachers.
Do you enjoy math? I hope so! If not, browsing these links just may change your mind. Most of these posts were submitted by the bloggers themselves; others are drawn from my overflowing Google Reader. From preschool to high school, there are plenty of interesting things to learn.
Let the mathematical fun begin…
Be My (Math) Valentine
Just as I was looking for a creative Valentine’s craft for Kitten, this showed up in my inbox:
Xi at 360 provides step-by-step instructions, with photos:
And for more Valentine’s Day fun:
Graph-It Game
[Photo by Scott Schram via Flickr.]
For Leon’s Christmas gift, Alex made the Graph-It game. She wrapped a pad of graph paper and wrote up the instructions:
To play Graph-It, one person designs a picture made by connecting points on a coordinate graph. He reads the points to the other player, who tries to reproduce the picture.
Renée’s Platonic Mobile
Alexandria Jones struggled to think of a Christmas gift that a one-month-old baby could enjoy, but finally she got an idea.
She cut empty cereal boxes to make regular polygons: 6 squares, 12 regular pentagons, and 32 equilateral triangles. Using small pieces of masking tape, she carefully formed the five Platonic solids. Then she mixed flour and water into a runny paste. She tore an old newspaper into small strips and soaked them in the paste. She covered each solid with a thin layer of paper.
