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!
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.”
You can use these math activities to play with your counting rope:
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:
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…
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…
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:
[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.
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.
Check out Nick Johnson’s Story of the innertube as a histogram.
Celebrate Math Storytelling Day by making up and sharing math stories. Everyone loves a story, so this is a great way to motivate your children to play around with math. What might a math story involve? Patterns, logic, history, puzzles, relationships, fictional characters, … and yes, even numbers.
What story will you tell?
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If you’d like to help fund the blog on an on-going basis, then please head to my Patreon page.
If you liked this post, and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal: paypal.me/DeniseGaskinsMath. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.
Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!
“Math Storytelling Day” copyright © 2010 by Denise Gaskins. Image at the top of the post copyright © Nick Johnson via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
Tomorrow, September 23, is the equinox — when night and day are equally balanced (or would be, if the sun appeared as a point, rather than a disc). If we lived on the equator, the sun would appear directly overhead at noon and would cast no shadow. Therefore, it’s a great day to perform Eratosthenes’ experiment of measuring the earth:
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 