SamizdatMath

Greetings, Phrens! This is an activity that takes 1 - 2 class sessions and teaches your young students (grades 2 - 5) something that is less scary than human reproduction or racial discrimination: negative numbers! Seriously, if you aren't introducing your students to negative numbers at an early age, then you're not doing the best job you could at being a math teacher, and I'm not saying that to hurt your feelings, but because I want you to look good (and, as my hero, Vidal Sassoon said ove

Okay, you covered “odd” and “even” number with your students and they now know that all even numbers have a 0, 2, 4, 6 or 8 in the ones place (they don’t “end” with those digits, because numbers don’t have a “beginning” or “end,” they have “places”) and are odd if they have the digits 1, 3, 5, 7 or 9 in the ones place. All good! But let’s ramp this up a bit: your students now know one of the basic concepts of mathematics, better known as “parity,” which gives them an opportunity to conduct an i

Here's the deal: you want your students to practice addition and subtraction, and you'd like to do more than give them another cruddy worksheet, and you want EVERYONE to be challenged! You also want to be able to customize the activities so that each student gets the appropriate support and challenge, but you don't want to print ten different worksheets! Here's what I came up with: give students problems where they have to add AND subtract in the same problem. Example: What are 2 numbers that

You want to have your kids practice addition and subtraction problems, with and without re-grouping, but you’re sick of the contrived “word problems” in your textbook, or find the usual activites like “Scoot” dull and repetitive. So here’s something new: addition and subtraction puzzles that are creative, open-ended and, dare I say it, “challenging!” “One, Some or None?” is a game I learned from my graduate school professor, David Fuys, who learned it from another teacher, who invented it to g

Take a number tile from a bag: is it a moose or a squirrel? This activity is a fun and lively way for your kids to practice comparing numbers and classifying them as larger (moose) or smaller (squirrel.) The fun never stops: you can start with just placing the tile on the activity sheet in the correct column, or your students can use the moose/squirrel stamps provided to cut and paste the animal into the correct column. A third variation asks students to state how far the numbers is from the co

Nadia Geddit wanted to get into her building, but she forgot the code to the lock. However, she did remember some clues about the code. These are 5 clues about the code: 1) The sum of the fifth digit and the third digit is 14. 2) The fourth digit is one more than the second digit. 3) The first digit is one less than twice the second digit. 4) The sum of the second and third digit is 10. 5) The sum of all five digits is 30. What 5 digits must Nadia press to make the lock open? How wo

You've seen photos of these store bloopers around the web, and say to yourself, "you know, this would be great to use in my class...." but you never have the photo, and you never have the time to photoshop out the brands, fix the colors, crop the image and collect it all in one place. Well, it's all been done for you, and only for the magic price of $4.95, which is nothing when you consider there are 20 different "math fails" that range from simple counting (how many nuggets are printed on that

There are three crates. The first contains only apples; the second contains only oranges, and the third contains a combination of apples and oranges. Unfortunately, all the labels on the crates are incorrect. You can take only one piece of fruit from a crate, and may not look inside while you do it. From which crate would you take a piece of fruit to find out where to put the correct labels? A man who owned a winery recently passed away. In his will, he left 21 barrels, seven of which are fille

Winning Touch is a partner activity where students use tiles to fill in the products on a multiplication board. Each student starts with 4 tiles, and then a "shared" tile is chosen to be placed on the board to begin the game. Each student takes turns finding a combination of factors that will allow a tile to be placed on the board (for example, if the student has a tile marked "18", s/he can play it on 9 and 2, 2 and 9, 3 and 6, or 6 and 3. However, the tile must touch another tile that is alrea