Let’s play math!

Math concepts: odd numbers, even numbers, greater-than/less-than, rounding off, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, negative numbers, prime numbers, square numbers, problem solving, mental math
Number of players: two or more
Equipment: pencil (or pen) and paper for every player

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Once again, CurrClick (formerly Homeschool eStore) is celebrating Mother’s Day with 3 days of free downloads, including the Math Mammoth Clock worktext by Hall of Fame math blogger Maria Miller.

Photo by Niner.

The daughter who supplies my header photos has started a blog to show off her pictures:

Niner’s SnapFair
[It's pronounced "NEE-ner."]

Her photography skills continue to improve, and her sense of humor comes through in the stories that accompany each photo. I’m sure she’d love to have you stop by and visit!

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Photo by MC Quinn.

Help! My daughter struggles with arithmetic. I guess she is like me: just not a math person. She is an outstanding reader. When we do word problems, she usually has no trouble. She’s a whiz at strategy games and beats her dad at chess every time. But numbers — yikes! When we play Yahtzee, she gets lost trying to add up her score. The simple basics of adding and subtracting confuse her.

Since I find math difficult myself, it’s hard for me to know what she needs. What’s missing to make it click for her? She used to think math was fun and tested well above grade level, but I listened to some well-meaning advice and totally changed the way we were schooling. I switched from using workbooks and games to using Saxon math, and she got extremely frustrated. Now she hates math.

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Two blog posts that brightened a stormy afternoon:

New Element
At The Common Room.

Severe Weather Testing Protocols
At Fractions speak louder than nerds…

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Those who study such things estimate that only 5-6% of Internet users take advantage of RSS feeds. That’s a shame, because RSS can make life so much simpler. Why visit all the interesting blogs and news sites individually, when you could get the latest information on a single site?

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Photo by Arbron.

This week only, CurrClick (which carries the Math Mammoth workbook series) is offering Quotations from Shakespeare’s Plays as a free download. This ebook offers copywork tips from Charlotte Mason and about 30 pages of passages from Macbeth, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, etc.

And if you are planning a study of the Bard, you won’t want to miss the following always-free Internet resources.

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Photo by Brian - Progressive Spin.

Logic is the science of making valid deductions and proofs — and it is also a fruitful topic for blackboard quotes. Here are a few of my favorites:

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

— G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Orthodox

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Photo by ninjapoodles.

Do you and your students have trouble keeping track of those pesky English/American measurements? Here is a great visual showing the relationship between common volumes:

How Many Pints in a Gallon?

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Photo by Clearly Ambiguous.

If you blog about MathCounts, beware that they recently overhauled their website — which made almost everyone’s links to them obsolete. I ran a routine check for dead links and found quite a few on my blog. I hope that I’ve caught most of them, but if you stumble across one of those nasty “Page not found” messages when you click a link on my blog, I hope you will report it in the comments section.

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Math concepts: slope, logical strategy
Number of players: 2 or more
Equipment: 4×4 or larger grid, pebbles or other tokens to mark squares

Set up

Alexandria Jones and her brother Leon played Avoid Three with pebbles on a grid scratched in the sand, but you can also use pencils or markers on graph paper. You need a rectangular playing area at least 4×4 squares large. The bigger your grid, the longer your game.

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Photo by peigianlong.

Here is a puzzle from Just a Substitute Teacher:

Lesson plan entry: “Hand out worksheet packets and have students staple before starting. They know what to do.”

Sounds simple enough! Four numbered sheets, eight total pages, printed front and back. What could go wrong?

Do you know how many possible combinations four pieces of paper can be arranged for stapling?

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Remember the Math Adventurer’s Rule: Figure it out for yourself! Whenever I give a problem in an Alexandria Jones story, I will try to post the answer soon afterwards. But don’t peek! If I tell you the answer, you miss out on the fun of solving the puzzle. So if you haven’t worked these problems yet, go back to the original post. Figure them out for yourself — and then check the answers just to prove that you got them right.

Puzzle: Figuring out figurate numbers

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Photo by frumbert.

Alexandria Jones’s parents decided that the family needed to relax after the excitement of tracking Simon Skulk, so they spent the next day at a beach on the Mediterranean coast. Leon collected pebbles and tried to build up figurate numbers — numbers that make a figure, or shape — the way Dr. Theano had shown them.

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Photo by meichimite.

Alexandria Jones and her family flew to Italy for spring break. Her father, the famous archaeologist, had to visit an excavation.

It was late when their plane landed in Crotone, a small coastal city near the instep of Italy’s boot. Dr. Jones had used the Internet to find a hotel that allowed pets, so Alex was able to snuggle down with her favorite pillow — her trusty dog, Ramanujan.

The original school of mathematics

The next day, Dr. Jones introduced his family to Sonya Theano, a former student of his and the director of this dig. “Come, let me show you around,” Dr. Theano said. “We’ve uncovered several buildings of a small compound, set apart from the city of Crotona, as it was called then. From the pottery and trade goods, we estimate these buildings were in use around 550-500 BCE.”

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Photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.

The cold came back and knocked me flat, but there are compensations. The downtime gave me a chance to browse my overflowing bookmarks folder, and I found something to add to my resource page. Princess Kitten and I enjoyed exploring these games and quizzes from Ambleweb.

Math games by elementary students

Each game was designed by (or at least with the help of) 4th-6th grade students at Ambleside CE Primary School.

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Photo by Complicated.

Princess Kitten is recovering from her cold and getting some energy back. She came to me and said wistfully, “I wish I could do backwards math.”

I looked up from my keyboard. “Backwards math? What do you mean?”

“Umm. It’s kinda hard to explain, but I can show you.”

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Photo by RBerteig.

Take a break from “serious” math and have a little fun today with some classics of recreational mathematics. Do you have a favorite math or logic fallacy? Please share it in the Comments below.

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At our house, we’re fighting persistent colds, and I think these “new and improved” Puffs would be just the thing to cheer up my 9yo! Now that the season has officially turned, I need to put my talented photographer daughter to work on spring pictures for my header. Meanwhile, here is a round-up of the happenings at Let’s play math! blog this month…

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The hectic holidays kept me from finishing the Christmas stories of Alexandria Jones. I am finally getting them typed up, but I past-dated them to keep the seasonal connection. So if you want to read more, here are the newest posts:

Magic square puzzles

Christmas puzzle answers

• Puzzle: Figuring out figurate numbers
• Alex’s & Leon’s homeschool puzzle
• Leonhard’s block puzzles
• Puzzles for the New Year
• Quotations XVIII: The art of asking questions

Sitting at home with a cold, tired of watching TV and playing video games, stumbled upon…

A great theorem from math history

The Infinitude of Primes

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Photo by powerbooktrance.

Paraphrased from a homeschooling math discussion forum:

Help me teach fractions! My son can do long subtraction problems that involve borrowing, and he can handle basic fraction math, but problems like give him a brain freeze. To me, this is an easy problem, but he can’t grasp the concept of borrowing from the whole number. It is even worse when the math book moves on to .

Several people replied to this question, offering advice about various fraction manipulatives that might be used to demonstrate the concept. I am not sure that manipulatives are needed or helpful in this case. The boy seems to have the basic concept of subtraction down, but he gets flustered and is unsure of what to do in the more complicated mixed-number problems.

Let’s take a quick look at what is involved in a calculation like this…

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Remember the Math Adventurer’s Rule: Figure it out for yourself! Whenever I give a problem in an Alexandria Jones story, I will try to post the answer soon afterwards. But don’t peek! If I tell you the answer, you miss out on the fun of solving the puzzle. So if you haven’t worked these problems yet, go back to the original posts. Figure them out for yourself — and then check the answers just to prove that you got them right.

Leonhard’s block puzzles

Alex’s & Leon’s homeschool puzzle

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Photo by joiseyshowaa.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!
In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade
— kept in heaven for you,
who through faith are shielded by God’s power
until the coming of the salvation
that is ready to be revealed in the last time.

In this you greatly rejoice,
though now for a little while
you may have had to suffer grief
in all kinds of trials.

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Photo by dengski.

Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

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Photo by gotplaid?.

While checking out the book table after a homeschool group meeting, Maria Jones glanced up to see her children laughing with some kids she did not recognize. Driving home, she asked about the new family, but Alex and Leon had been too busy exchanging silly stories to even ask the strangers’ names.

“Well,” Leon said, “the boy told me he has twice as many sisters as brothers.”

No way!” said Alex. “The girl told me that she has the same number of brothers and sisters.”

How can that be?

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Leonhard Jones is Alexandria Jones’s younger brother. He enjoys woodworking, and he cut a wooden cube into 8 smaller blocks to make himself a puzzle.

Puzzle #1

Leon painted the 8 blocks with his two favorite colors: red and forest green. When he was finished, Leon could put the blocks together into a red cube, or he could switch them around to make a green cube.

How did Leon paint his blocks?

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Photo by Drab Makyo.

I have a huge, long-neglected bookmarks folder labeled “To add to resource page.” I am never going to find time to sort and review all of those links. But if I post a few at random now and then, perhaps you will find something useful.

So here are five new links I am adding to my Free (mostly) math resources on the Internet page.

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Now there is an ancient Greek letter,
And I think no other is better.
It isn’t too tall,
It might look very small,
But its digits, they go on forever.

— Scott
at Mrs. Mitchell’s Virtual School

Time to celebrate

Are your students doing anything special for Day? After two months with no significant break, we are going stir crazy. We need a day off — and what better way could we spend it than to play math all afternoon?

If you need ideas, here are some great pages:

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