SamizdatMath

Think about it: the average American eats over 40 slices of pizza a year; if you live to be 80, and assuming you start at around 5 years old, this is 75 years of pizza x 40 slices per year, or 3,000 slices in your lifetime! Since this delicious food is such an important part of our life, doesn't it make sense that we understand everything there is about the economics of buying pizza? This is a series of activities that examines the economics of pizza in several different ways. First, it shows

This is a second set of 10 3-D spatial problem solving puzzles that use 2 - 3 of the seven Soma pieces. There are three different kinds of puzzles: Basic Puzzles: These are puzzles which show the solution to the puzzle in three different colors. Students have to locate the proper pieces and assemble them as shown in the diagram. Intermediate Puzzles: These are puzzles where the solver is told which 2 - 3 pieces to use, but not how they fit together. Students locate the individual pieces and th

Greetings 3-D fans: this is a second edition of puzzles designed to be used with Snap Cubes or Multi-Link Cubes (NOT Unifix Cubes, unless you purchase a separate zero-gravity diode, which is currently out of stock....) We live in an era where children spend the majority of their time at home or in school looking at a screen: they swipe, tap and click their way through lessons or activities, and what do they get out of it? Bubkus! These are puzzles designed to develop and improve your students

This is the ultimate and penultimate guide to teaching the area of a triangle. If you're teaching your students the formula base x height ÷ 2 and handing them a bunch of problems where you show the base and height and have them do the rest, well, you're just wasting your time, and miseducating your students. Smooth move, Ferguson... Here's are three essential things you should be teaching your students about finding the area of a triangle, some or all of which you are not teaching: 1) Every tr

If you're going to teach your students about how to find the area of a parallelogram (actually, it's technically a "rhomboid," because a parallelogram could also be a rectangle....) then you're most likely going to doing something bad like "multiply the base times the height," give a couple of dumb problems and call it a day. That's NO way to teach geometry, more or less math, or anything for that matter! This is a collection of geometric "dissections" where students cut out rhomboids, and, us

First of all, let’s get one thing out of the way: Archimedes never used the Greek letter “pi” when he used it to calculate the area and circumference of a circle. No, never; so just by reading this blurb you've learned something new! The point of this activity is threefold: the first is to show that as you double the diameter of a circle, the area of that circle would quadruple. That’s a very important concept, because many of your students have only experienced relationships where if

Here’s what I’m throwing down in this activity: many of us are teaching surface area and volume of rectangular prisms, but other than memorizing a set of formulas, our students are not getting a whole lot out of it. Of course, you can blame that obsessive focus we have on standardized testing for our compulsion to teach - test - move on to the next topic, but c’mon, you can do better than that, right? This is a short activity that you can do in one period that will not only help your studen

Here's the deal: you want your kids to do challenging puzzles with interesting shapes (I'm talking to >you<, pattern blocks!) but the problem is that many of these puzzles are waaaay too hard for your pre-K through 1st graders. Even a 2 piece pentomino puzzle would require sorting through 66 combinations of 12 different pentomino pieces before locating the correct pair to make the shape. This is an advanced version of my other set of pentomino challenges, Pentomino Challenges for the Earl

Here's the deal: you want your kids to do challenging puzzles with interesting shapes (I'm talking to >you<, pattern blocks!) but the problem is that many of these puzzles are waaaay too hard for your pre-K through 1st graders. Even a 2 piece pentomino puzzle would require sorting through 105 combinations of 15 different pentomino pieces before locating the correct pair to make the shape. What I've done here is break down the process into three steps: the first set of puzzles practices id

This activity is an invitation for your students to take part in an original piece of mathematical research. We begin with a problem: there is a 6 x 6 apartment split up into 36 "tiles" that need to be arranged so that all 4 apartments use the same number of tiles (9 each) and where each apartment is the exact same shape. Oh, and the apartment has to include a bathroom and kitchen, as shown on the floor plan. From here, the problem morphs into a larger exploration of how many ways this 6 x 6 ti

In this activity, students build a device that allows them to classify angles as acute, obtuse, right, straight and reflex, and estimate their measures using "landmark angles." The template can be cut out and assembled in about 8 minutes using scissors, glue stick, a hole puncher and a paper fastener. I've included step-by-step photographic instructions on how to cut out and assemble the device. Included in this activity is a set of 12 angle classification and estimation "clue cards" which stu

Do you have a set of Geoblocks sitting around in your classroom waiting for someone to do something interesting with them? Have you exhausted the sorting and identifying edges, faces and vertices (or "corners," if you will....)? Do you want something really neat to do with them which will develop your students' abilities to visualize and represent 3 dimensional shapes in 2 dimensions? This is a set of 16 Geoblock "search and sketch" puzzles. Students look at the sheet and find the block which m

This is a fun activity I whipped up for my 5th grade teachers: basically, it helps students understand the relationship between surface area and volume of a solid by seeing that it is possible to remove cubes from a solid without affecting its surface area, but that its also possible to re-configure a solid so that its volume remains constant while changing the surface area. What's fun about this activity is that it the answers are "sketches" - that is, the students record their answers in isom

This is a collection of 11 different challenges in which your students take an "oblique" view of a building and then snap it together using Unifix or Snap cubes. After the building has been assembled, students create blueprints of the top, front and side view. My diatribe: in an age where everyone spends entirely too much time in front of screens, shouldn't we also have the opportunity to work with our eyes and hands on visual puzzles? Yes, I'm talking about genuine "hands on" tasks that involv

These activities are centered around the idea of measuring and constructing pitched roofs. Depending on a building's cost, function and location, a roof can either have a very steep pitch (which would mean a very acute angle, like you would find on ski houses in the mountains) or an obtuse angle (like a house in the tropics where it rains a lot and the water has to run off slowly to prevent flooding.) These activities are designed for students to work on individually or in pairs: the first part