This game builds number sense and a playful approach to math.
Many parents remember struggling to learn math. We hope to provide a better experience for our children. And one of the best ways for children to enjoy learning is through hands-on play.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s play some math!
Math Concepts: number properties, numbers within 100.
Players: two players, child and adult.
Equipment: printed hundred chart.
This game builds understanding of decimals, and also of the inverse relationship between multiplication and division.
Many parents remember struggling to learn math. We hope to provide a better experience for our children. And one of the best ways for children to enjoy learning is through hands-on play.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s play some math!
Math Concepts: multiplying decimals, decimal place value.
Players: two players or two teams.
Equipment: printed game board, colored markers or a set of matching tokens for each player, two paperclips or other small tokens to mark the factors.
In my new book, Charlotte Mason’s Living Math, I encourage families to explore the world of math by asking big, open-ended questions.
[Now available exclusively in my Playful Math Store! Ebook only at the moment, but print editions are coming soon.]
Here’s an example of such a question, an excerpt from my earlier book, 70+ Things To Do with a Hundred Chart: Number, Shape, and Logic Activities from Preschool to Middle School.
Have fun exploring math with your kids!
Isn’t it fun when children surprise us with their understanding?
All my children have figured out ways to do things in math that I would never have expected, and I’ve learned quite a bit from listening to their explanations.
But what if the child’s creative method makes it hard for them to learn what our textbook wants to teach?
One of my favorite things as a teacher was to gather a group of children to play math together.
Call it a math club or math circle, the name didn’t matter, but the activity was always fun. We did non-schooly games and projects, and the kids enjoyed both the camaraderie and the experience of thinking hard in a stress-free setting.
If you’d like to pull together a math club/circle of your own, here are some tips.
Today’s puzzle involves an unusual teacher trying to collect students to participate in a group activity…
Puzzles can be fun ways to idle away a stormy afternoon. Or they can be doorways into the world of math, invitations to explore.
And puzzles are great for teaching, too!
Here is a puzzle from a master of mathematical ingenuity…
Recently, I stumbled on an old blog post featuring Singapore Math problems, and it brought back memories.
Back when my children were young, the original Primary Math series from Singapore was one of my favorite math curricula. I tweaked our school program constantly, so none of my kids had the same education, but three of them spent a good part of their elementary years in those books.
And I followed the Math in Singapore 2007 blog for its single season of publication. The blog has gone the way of many others, preserved only in the Internet Archive.
In the post I re-discovered, Patsy Wang-Iverson was reporting on a week-long seminar organized by Celine Koh, who offered the following problems (adapted from school exams and study books) for teacher discussion.
How many can you solve?
One of the stretch goals for my Charlotte Mason’s Living Math Kickstarter campaign is to add a math journaling prompt to the end of each chapter. So, I’ve been playing around with ideas to get readers writing.
Since the book’s all about how to build mathematical reasoning, I’m looking for ways to prompt creative thinking and flexibility in math calculations.
I found some fun ideas in Guy Gattegno and Martin Hoffman’s Handbook of Activities for the Teaching of Mathematics (which you can download here), including the following riff off a puzzle created by Lewis Carroll.
Mental math is doing calculations with our minds, though we can use scratch paper or whiteboards to make notes as we work.
Doing mental math, children use the basic principles of arithmetic to simplify problems so they can think about number relationships, mastering the basic structures of how numbers work, the same structures that underlie algebraic reasoning.
As always, we rely on two key mental-math strategies.
Division is the mirror image of multiplication, the inverse operation that undoes multiplication, which means we are scaling numbers down into smaller parts. Important friendly numbers include halves, thirds, and tenths, plus the square numbers and any multiplication facts the student happens to remember.
By doing mental math, we help our children use the basic principles of arithmetic to simplify problems so they can think about number relationships, mastering the basic structures of how numbers work.
And the more our children practice these structures in mental math, the better prepared they will be to recognize the same principles in algebra.
The basic idea of subtraction is finding the difference between two quantities: comparing a larger amount to a smaller one, figuring out what’s left when you remove a part, or finding the distance between two measurements (or two points on the number line).
When you work with young children learning subtraction, remember our two key mental-math strategies.
For early subtraction with numbers less than 20, the most important friendly numbers are 5 and 10, the pairs of numbers that make 10, and the doubles.
When children apply their creative minds to reasoning about math, they can use friendly numbers to get close to an answer, and then tweak the result as needed.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 