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

Okay, phrens, you're teaching your students how to round numbers and this is what you are NOT going to do: "Students, today we're going to learn how round numbers to the nearest hundreds. To round a number to the hundreds, start by placing your finger on the number furthest to the left (places finger on number) and then look over to the right and then sing this song, "If it's less than 4 or smaller, round it down; if it's 5 or greater, then go right up!" (If you'll pardon the pun.) Then give yo

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

Did you know that the ninths fractions can easily be converted by taking the numerator and turning it into a repeating decimal? For example, 4/9 = .444... and 8/9 = .888....? Did you know that the 11ths fractions cycle through the 9 times tables through the numerator? 5/11 = .4545.... and 7/11 = .6363.... These are great patterns to know because it can save your students hours of tedious calculations when converting fractions to decimals. Since patterns are the "language of mathematics" then s

This is an activity I’ve done with my 5th, 6th and 7th graders to help them understand the importance of “thinking” before rounding off a number. You know, some of us (not you, of course) teach rounding as a “rule” and our students blindly go off rounding numbers without thinking about the implication of doing so. These two activities are designed to impress upon your students that when they round off a number, they should do it with a certain amount of forethought, because if they blindly follo

This is a short activity with specific instructions that deals with the misconception that the decimal point is the "center" of the base ten system. The reality is that the decimal point has two functions, one of which is to act as a "pointer" to the ones place, which is the actual divider of the place value chart. This goes a long way towards explaining to your students why there is no "opposite" of the ones place: it is the actual center from which the decimals and whole numbers originate. Th

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 "80 + 4 = 84," instead of alternating "4 + 80 = 84") There are 20 different puzzles that use ones and tens

Three different "EZ-CUT" and paste activities with fractions, decimals and percents. Activity 1: Students cut out proper fractions and match them to equivalent terminating and non-terminating decimals. Some decimals are rounded to the nearest thousandth, others use a vinculum or ellipse to show that it repeats. Activity 2: Students cut out proper and improper fractions and match to equivalent decimals, both terminating and non-terminating. Students round off to the nearest thousandth when nec

It's wild, it's crazy, it's Jack Gabarino! Great for enhancing your students' problem solving skills.... Machina! Machina! Machina!

Greetings friend & fellow educator, Here we go again: just when you thought you had everything fixed up and all your ducks lined up in a neat little row, I’m back to give you some straight talk about place value, because, as I’m fond of saying, you’re teaching it wrong. Not only are you teaching it wrong, but you probably don’t even understand much of it yourself. Oh, you thought you knew everything, just because you bought a few games and did some random stuff with those silly “foldables” th

How much Cash is in that Stash? If you've ever struggled with finding a fun and effective way to teach the distributive property of multiplication over addition and subtraction, this is the activity for you. Using the example of a suitcase full of dollar bills, students will learn how to effectively count the cash in groups by dividing up the cash into smaller rectangular arrays, whose products can be combined to find a solution. This activity includes a sample problem, specific teaching instru

"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

Ben and Ilene are having an argument: they are looking at a number line with a 0 on one end, and 1 million on the other end. The question is: where would 1 thousand be? Ben & Ilene have different insights into the problem: Ben says that 1,000 is a large number and so is a million, so it must be close to that side. Ilene says that 1 thousand is much smaller than 1 million, and it belongs closer to 0. Is either of them correct, or is one of them "more correct" than the other? I've included 5 exam