SamizdatMath

This is a rounding game I developed for a colleague at my school: I am a working teacher (as I have been for the past 37 years) so I know stuff. And here’s what I know: games are fun, learners like to play games, and games should exercise the learner’s mind in a variety of ways. Which is how I developed the “rounding” and “un-rounding” games. The “Rounding Game” is your basic bingo game: you turn over two cards, round off the number to the nearest ten, find that rounded number on the bingo board

This is a rounding game I developed for a colleague at my school: I am a working teacher (as I have been for the past 37 years) so I know stuff. And here’s what I know: games are fun, learners like to play games, and games should exercise the learner’s mind in a variety of ways. Which is how I developed the “rounding” and “un-rounding” games. The “Rounding Game” is your basic bingo game: you turn over two cards, round off the number to the nearest ten, find that rounded number on the bingo board

This activity came about because my students get really bored with rounding off decimals for no particular reason. I’m sure you’ve seen these dumb “exercises” where kids get a bunch of random numbers and then are told to round them off to the nearest thousandth, hundredth or tenth, and really, who cares? So I adapted another set of activities that I developed for my younger students and came up with this! But I have another item on my agenda: one of the things I have always advocated is giving

These are highly unusual puzzles that are a great way to practice place value while stimulating your students' abilities in deductive reasoning. Each puzzle is set up as an "acrostic" that has to be filled in vertically and horizontally. The "beginner" puzzles are simple to solve, but they are valuable in that they help students to stop thinking of assembling place value by "order" (such as ".8 + .04 = .84," instead of alternating ".04 + .8 = .84") There are 20 different puzzles that use ones a

So, you’re teaching your kids how to add and subtract fractions, and after a couple of those cruddy worksheets, you decide there’s room for your charges to do something that encourages critical thinking: decimal paths! The trick here is to wind your way through the path, adding and subtracting decimals along the way, until you’ve got the highest total possible. To make it even more interesting, you have to make at least 12 connections. Fun, right? Here are some tips on how to use this in your c

I love those "cut n' paste" activities, but I wonder how much time is wasted by students who have to cut out all those little pieces along the lines and then maneuver them into place. What good are these activities if the students spend 20 minutes cutting and only 10 minutes "thinking" about math? In my version of a "fractions to percents" cut n' paste, I've designed the pieces to be cut out with a minimum of cutting, so that your students can focus on actually "doing the math." By placing the

I love those "cut n' paste" activities, but I wonder how much time is wasted by students who have to cut out all those little pieces along the lines and then maneuver them into place. What good are these activities if the students spend 20 minutes cutting and only 10 minutes "thinking" about math? In my version of a "fractions to decimals" cut n' paste, I've designed the pieces to be cut out with a minimum of cutting, so that your students can focus on actually "doing the math." By placing the

A lot of people ask me where I get all the ideas for my materials, which, you’ll have to admit, are rather strange in many ways. When you see math “everywhere” like I do, you’re always thinking about how math “fits in.” I came home from work one day in the mood to make gungjung tteokbokki, and wouldn’t you know, all I had was frozen pork. So I pulled it out of the freezer and stuck it in the microwave on the “defrost” setting (which actually works pretty well.) What I noticed was that I had purc

This is a collection of 8, count 'em, 8 different "Yogi-isms" that have to do with some mis-statement of a mathematical concept, featuring a writing prompt in the form of a letter to Yogi Berra explaining his mathematical mistake. The statements include: "90% of baseball is mental; the other half is physical." “You have to give 100 percent in the first half of the game. If that isn’t enough, in the second half, you have to give what is left.” When Yogi ordered a pizza, the waitress asked h

Howdy peeps, how are you all doing? I think you’re really going to like this activity (it is not a “product,” it is an activity) and if you paid the royal sum of $3.95 for it, you should consider it a bargain: it represents the work of someone who has 30 years of pre-K through college mathematics behind him, so you know it’s good for your kids. This activity is based on the idea that in order to embed concepts you have to develop “rich associations” between them. That is, when the student “se

"By The Digits" is a game I developed where students take get a series of numbers and decide whether to place them in the tenths or hundredths place; at the end of 7 rounds, they add up the tenths and hundredths to get as close to 1.00 as possible. This is an interactive version for the SmartBoard. Pressing each digit under "round" selects a new digit from 0 - 9. After pressing the button, write down whether the number should go in the tenth or hundredths place. At the end of 7 rounds, add up t

Decimal Place Value, Decimal Estimation Strategy Game I developed this activity a course of years ago. The first versions involved whole numbers, where players drew cards and used ones and tens to make 100 (I actually have a similar activity that uses cubes and rods to make a flat; it’s called “Close to a Flat.”) In this activity, players select numbers and place them in different place values to get as close to 1 as possible. The game can be played with a set of 0 - 9 digit cards (which are