Let’s Play Math!

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 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 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 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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My elementary Math Club students had fun practicing their math facts and “out of the box” thinking with Hexa-Trex puzzles. The object of Hexa-Trex is to find a path through all the number and operation tiles to make a true equation. The “Easy” puzzles are just the right level for my 4th-5th grade students, although they get stumped whenever the equations require Order of Operations. One girl enjoyed the puzzles enough to take our extra pages home for her dad.

Hexa-Trex puzzles were featured in the October issue of Games magazine, and now you can enjoy Hexa-Trex away from the computer with Bogusia Gierus’s new book, The First Book of Hexa-Trex Puzzles. If you are thinking ahead to Christmas (can it be that time already?!), and if you have a puzzle lover in the family, this little book would make a fun stocking-stuffer.

• more math club ideas

What can you do when you are stumped? Too many students sit and stare at the page, waiting for inspiration to strike — and when the solution doesn’t crack their heads open and step out, fully formed, they complain: “Math is too hard!”

So this year I have given my Math Club students a couple of mini-posters to put up on the wall above their desk, or wherever they do their math homework. The first gives four questions to ask yourself as you think through a math problem, and the second is a list of problem-solving strategies.

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If you have an older homeschool student, be sure to check out Homeschool eStore’s freebie for this week: the American Classics Study Guide.

This collection of references and assignments looks at To Kill a Mockingbird, Death of Salesman, The Crucible, The Glass Menagerie, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and the poetry of Robert Frost. Students learn the essential themes, issues, characterization and writing style of the texts. There are activities and assignments to choose from, including essay questions, creative responses and projects to complete.

Homeschool eStore offers a free educational ebook each week, and many items are on sale for the month of September. And since this is a math blog, let me point out that Homeschool eStore sells Maria Miller’s excellent Math Mammoth workbooks (also available as individual titles—in Spanish, too).

Related Posts: education other than math, resources for math

Have you considered experimenting with writing in your math class this year? It seems that math journals are a growing fad, and for good reason:

Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own.

—William Zinsser
Writing to Learn

Math journal entries can be as simple as class notes, or they can be research projects that take hours of experimentation and pondering. Students may use the journal to store their thoughts as they work several days to solve a challenge problem of the week, or they might jot down quick reflections about what they learned in today’s math class.

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From a recent e-mail:

Hello! I am on the board of a homeschool co-op. We have had requests for a math club and wondered if you have any tips for starting one. We service children from K-10th and would need to try to meet the needs of as many ages as possible.

There are several ways you might organize a homeschool math club, depending on the students you have and on your goals. I think you would have to split the students by age groups — it is very hard to keep that wide of a range of students interested. Then decide whether you want an activity-oriented club or a more academic focus.

When I started my first math club, I raided the math shelves in the children’s section at my library (510-519) for anything that interested me. I figured that if an activity didn’t interest me, I couldn’t make it fun for the kids. Over the years we have done a variety of games, puzzles, craft projects, and more — always looking for something that was NOT like whatever the kids would be doing in their textbooks at home.

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These puzzles look like a lot of fun for whole number and integer arithmetic review. I think they would make a great warm-up at the beginning of a class or math club meeting.

Hat tip: MathPuzzle.com

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I found two helpful articles at squareCircleZ.

Ten Ways to Survive the Math Blues
General tips on how to learn as much as possible from any math course.

The need for further exploration
What to do after you find the answer to a math problem.

• more cool things I’ve found online