It’s always a challenge to keep up with homeschooling during the holiday season, but here’s a wonderful way to weave mathematics into your daily schedule: The Nrich Advent Calendars offer a fun math game or activity for every day in December until Christmas Eve. Click the image to visit the calendar that fits your student’s level.
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!
If you haven’t subscribed to Vi Hart’s blog yet, what are you waiting for?
[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.
A mathematical Christmas? You bet! For instance, I just noticed that Raymond Smullyan’s The Lady or the Tiger is finally back in print. My family and my math club students have enjoyed many of the puzzles in this book over the years, and I can’t think of a better stocking stuffer for the mathophile in your family.
(I do hope that means the rest of Raymond Smullyan’s puzzle books will be coming back, too!)
In the holiday gift-giving spirit, I’ve started making a list. Check out the links below for more mathematical Christmas present ideas.
[Photo by theogeo.]
Christmas afternoon is a slow time at our house. How shall we while away the hours until the turkey is done? With math, of course!
Check out this puzzle from Blinkdagger.
[Photo by littledan77.]
He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness
and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves,
in whom we have redemption,
the forgiveness of sins.
[Photo by krisdecurtis.]
Being moderately tech-illiterate, I don’t pay much attention to SEO (Search Engine Optimization, the magic art of convincing Google to fetch me more readers). Even so, I enjoy browsing through the list of search terms that have brought visitors to my blog. Sometimes I find ideas to write about, or motivation to move an old draft off the back burner, or simply a chuckle at the funny things people look for on the Web.
This month, however, the most popular search term seems strangely out of season — more than 300 people have come to this site wanting “Christmas” or “Christmas tree.”
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 