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

"On a bad day, I have no ideas. On a good day, I have a lot of wrong ideas. At least with wrong ideas, I can mix them together and come up with a right answer." That's the idea behind this number puzzle, which I've intentionally designed to be really tricky and frustrating (at least, it was for the 3rd through 6th graders I tried it on.) The relationship between the three columns appear to be arbitrary, but there actually is some method to the madness: the students should be encouraged to come

This is a collection of 10 different algebra puzzles that use 3 different variables which are represented as rectangles, triangles and hexagons. Yes, we know that "adult" algebra uses X, Y and Z, but since this is designed to be appealing for our younger students (and because abstraction is still tough for them) I've used these geometric shapes instead. I've also limited the kinds of numbers students use by focusing on using 0 - 9 digit cards. This is so your students will not get frustrated wh

Greetings Phrens, This is an experiment for a third grade teacher who is struggling to engage two dyslexic students in the process of answering mathematical story problems. She showed me a set of story problems and described how a teacher had to sit next to the students and read the problems to the students, who then solved them. I thought about this and stated that this seemed like a very hard way to engage these students in problem solving, because the task was really more focused on reading

Note: There is now a video tutorial that goes with this activity: Division With Remainders: Just Do It (RIGHT!) Your students are "learning" about division, and if you're using a really, really cruddy curriculum, then they probably all sound like this: "I have 24 blah blah blahs which I'm packing into cases of (choose some divisor of 24.) How many cases will I be able to make. This, my friends, is a lackadaisical and churlish approach to teaching students about solving problems with division.

As you know, one of the things I have always advocated is giving children math problems that are interesting and challenging. I know, I know, this flies directly in the face of “well, if we give them hard things to do, then they’ll get discouraged and think math is hard.” Well, the truth is this: math is hard! And let me say another thing: anybody, young or old, experienced or not, is either lying or has never done “real math” if they think it is “easy.” In this activity, I’m pushing you to cha

Division is the most confusing operation we teach, and one of the reasons is that it comes in three dfferent formats (left to right, top to bottom, and "inside outside.") To make it even harder, the language can be confusing: we can say "28 ÷ 8 =" as "28 divided by 8," "how many 8s go into 28?", "8 divided into 28...." This is a set of 4 different activities that will help your students better understand the different formats that will appear when doing division. They will learn how to connect

This is the most complete guide you will ever own that answers each and every one of the questions you have ever had about teaching subtraction from grades K - 6. I mean, EVERY SINGLE THING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TEACHING SUBTRACTION FROM Kindergarten through 6th GRADE. How can this possibly be? Because it's over 75 pages long! This massively documented booklet includes EVERYTHING, including: • Why you should model subtraction beyond "SOAR" * What are the essential properties of subtr