Playing With Math: Stories from Math Circles, Homeschoolers, and Passionate Teachers

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

body_Book_cover_for_upload

Update: The crowdfunding campaign is now closed and the book is in the final stages. It should be headed to the printer soon. Check the Playing With Math homepage for publication and ordering information.

There’s a problem: Most people don’t like math. Why is that? Perhaps it has something to do with the way math is taught in school. As a teacher to my own kids and mentor to homeschooling parents, I’ve been fighting math anxiety for decades.

This book is one part of the solution.

Playing With Math: Stories from Math Circles, Homeschoolers, and Passionate Teachers features more than thirty authors who tell delightful stories of learning to appreciate math and of sharing their enthusiasm with their communities, families, or students. After every chapter is a puzzle, game, or activity to get you and your kids playing with math, too.

You can read a couple of excerpts at PlayingWithMath.org:

Continue reading Playing With Math: Stories from Math Circles, Homeschoolers, and Passionate Teachers

Playing with Pinterest: New Math Boards

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Do you like Pinterest? I’ve enjoyed exploring the site lately, so I set up a few boards where I can pin the goodies I find. It may take awhile before I get all the old games and posts from this blog loaded up, so save the links and come back often…

Playful Math Games & Activities

Middle-High School

As our children (and their parents!) play around with mathematical ideas and the relationships between them, we develop deep understanding that is strong enough to support future learning. Playful math links include math games, activities, and interesting lesson plans.

Math Doodling

Math Doodling

Making abstract math visual: Math doodles let us see and experiment with a wide range of mathematical structures — and even to feel them, if we include hands-on 3D doodles in clay or other media. Links include art projects, geometry constructions, and physical models to explore.

Math Teaching Tips & Resources

Math Teaching Tips

A variety of math teaching ideas for homeschool families or classroom teachers. Learning mathematics is more than just answer-getting: help your students make conceptual connections. These links are more “schooly” than on the other boards, and they include conceptual lessons that build your own understanding of mathematics as well as that of your students. And math notebooking resources, too.

MTaP Math Education Blog Carnival Archive

MTaP archive

Since early 2009, the Math Teachers at Play (MTaP) blog carnival has offered tips, tidbits, games, and activities for students and teachers of preschool through pre-college mathematics. Now published once a month, the carnival welcomes entries from parents, students, teachers, homeschoolers, and just plain folks. If you like to learn new things and play around with ideas, you are sure to find something of interest.

Math-Ed Quotes

Math-Ed Quotes

Inspiration for homeschooling parents and classroom teachers. This is where I’m posting my Wednesday Wisdom quotes.

And that’s the end of my Pinterest boards (so far).

What are some of your favorite Pinterest sites? Please share a link in the comments!

Math Teachers at Play #70

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

800px-Brauchtum_gesteck_70_1[Feature photo above by David Reimann via Bridges 2013 Gallery. Number 70 (right) from Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0).]

Do you enjoy math? I hope so! If not, browsing this post just may change your mind.

Welcome to the 70th edition of the Math Teachers At Play math education blog carnival — a smorgasbord of 42+ links to bloggers all around the internet who have great ideas for learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to pre-college. Let the mathematical fun begin!

By tradition, we start the carnival with a puzzle in honor of our 70th edition. But if you would like to jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.

Click here to continue reading.

2013 Advent Math from Nrich

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Click the images below to visit the Advent calendars, and your children can play with math every day until Christmas! You may also enjoy:

Primary Advent Calendar

“This Advent Calendar has a new activity for each day in the run-up to Christmas. All the activities are based on the theme of Planet Earth.”

advent1

Secondary Advent Calendar

“Behind each door of the Advent Calendar is one of our favourite activities with videos. Watch and enjoy!”

advent2

Pondering Large Numbers

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

[Feature photo above by Paolo Camera (CC BY 2.0) via Flickr.]

Half of our students were missing from this month’s homeschool teen math circle, but I challenged the three who did show up to wrap their brains around some large numbers. Human intuition serves us well for the numbers we normally deal with from day to day, but it has a hard time with numbers outside our experience. We did a simple yet fascinating activity.

First, draw a line across a page of your notebook. Label one end of the line $20 (the amount of money I had in my purse), and mark the other end as $1 trillion (rough estimate of the US government’s yearly overspending, the annual deficit):

large-numbers-baseline

  • Where on that line do you think $1 million would be?

Go ahead, try it! The activity has a much greater impact when you really do it, rather than just reading. Don’t try to over-think this, just mark wherever it feels right to you.

The kids were NOT eager to commit themselves, but I waited in silence until everyone made a mark.

  • Okay, now, where do you think $1 billion would be?

This was a bit easier. Once they had committed to a place for a million, they went about that much farther down the line to mark a billion.

Continue reading Pondering Large Numbers

Every Day Is Math Day

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Happy 11-12-13

Happy 11/12/13, otherwise known as “tenty-one, tenty-two, tenty-three.”

Do your young children have trouble counting in the teens? Try making up Funny Numbers to help them! It’s a great habit to develop, because Funny Numbers will come in handy as mental math tools throughout their school math career.

If you’d like to make your own Happy Math Day post, check out the instructions here: Every Day Is Mathematics Day. And please share a link in the comments section below — I’d love to see what math holiday you invent!

Update: The numbers 11, 12, and 13 form an arithmetic progression. If that sounds too scary for your kids, check out Patrick’s bedtime math discussion Making Progress, Arithmetically.

Algebra for (Almost) Any Age

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

VisualPatterns-org2

Fawn Nguyen’s Visual Patterns website just keeps getting better and better. Check it out:

In addition to the 115 puzzle patterns (as of this writing), the site features a Gallery page of patterns submitted by students. And under the “Teachers” tab, Fawn shares a form to guide students in thinking their way through to the algebraic formula for a pattern.

How can you use these patterns to develop algebraic thinking with younger students? Mike Lawler and sons demonstrate Pattern #1 in the YouTube video below.

Things To Do with a Hundred Chart #29

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

100chart puzzle

Here’s a new entry for my 20+ Things to Do with a Hundred Chart post:

(29) Blank 100 Grid Number Investigations: Challenge your students to deduce the secret behind each pattern of shaded squares. Then have them make up pattern puzzles of their own.
[Created by Stuart Kay. Free registration required to download pdf printable.]

Share Your Ideas

Can you think of anything else we might do with a hundred chart? Add your ideas in the Comments section below, and I’ll add the best ones to our master list.

Maze Game: Land or Water?

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

This was a fun activity from Moebius Noodles for our PK-1st grade Homeschool Math in the Park group. The children take turns making a maze and setting a dinosaur inside. Then the other dinosaurs (parents or siblings) try to guess whether their friend is on the land or in the water.

Draw the maze

Player #1

(1) First, draw a big circle on the white board. This is your lake.

(2) With a finger or a bit of cloth, erase a small section of the circle to create the opening for your maze.

(3) Starting at one edge of the opening, draw a random squiggle inside the circle. Make your squiggle end at the other edge of the opening.

Looks like Land

(4) Set your dinosaur anywhere inside the maze.

Player #2

(1) Now it’s your turn to guess. Is the dinosaur standing on the land? Is it swimming in the water?

(2) How will you figure out if you guessed right?

(3) Check by jumping across the lines of the maze. Each jump takes you across a boundary: Splash! (Into the water.) Thump! (Back on the land.) Splash! Thump! … Until you reach the dinosaur inside.

(4) Or go to the maze entrance and walk your dinosaur along the path. Can you find your way?

land or water

 
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If you’d like to help fund the blog on an on-going basis, then please join me on Patreon for mathy inspiration, tips, and an ever-growing archive of printable activities.

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!

“Maze Game: Land or Water?” copyright © 2013 by Denise Gaskins. All photos copyright © Denise Gaskins.

Happy Math Storytelling Day

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Feature photo (above) by L. Marie. Math comic by davidd. Both via flickr (CC BY 2.0).
Math-ter and Commander

Hooray for September 25th — it’s Math Storytelling Day!

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.

For inspiration, visit:

Have you and your children created any math stories? We’d love to hear! Please share your links in the comments section below.

Continue reading Happy Math Storytelling Day