SamizdatMath

4 Magic Square Puzzlers for EVerYOnE!

This is the last of this series of task cards using the theme of a "piggy bank" (remember those) to develop understanding and skills using pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. (Sorry fans of the half-dollar and silver dollar...) This is a sorting activity: students take a set of cards, look at the amount stated in the piggy bank and the coins outside and if they match, put it in the "correct" part of the sorting mat (included!) - if it's not a match, put it in the "incorrect" section of the so

Howdy you all! You know, one of the things I love about people who don't know much about math is that they think that there's always one right answer to a math question. Well, there isn't: the reality is that most math questions (even seemingly simple ones like "how much is 2 + 2?") have answers like "well, it depends." In the case of "how much is 2 + 2, it depends on the base system you're working in: if it was base 3, then the answer would be 11 (1 group of 3 and 1 remainder), or it it was bas

This is a collection of 24 different puzzles that challenges your students to find the coin combinations in a piggy bank. There are 8 pages of cards, with 3 puzzles on each card, in both glorious black/grey/white and pastel colors (pink and chartreuse.) Cut out the 24 different cards, laminate and then put out for your kiddos to solve. Lower number cards are easier, higher number cards are tougher. They can solve by putting the coins into the circles printed on the cards. You can check students

This is a collection of task cards where students are given two clues about what coins are inside the piggy bank: the first is the value of the coins, but since there could be many different combinations, there is a second clue, which specifies how many coins the student has to use. Fun! There are two sets of cards: one is in easy-peasy to print black & white, the other is in cutesy colors (pink and light blue.) You can print out the cards, cut and laminate them and have them for the rest of

And we're back! This is the first of a set of "coin card" activities that I designed for our first grade teachers and which received universal "thumbs up, Robert!" from the students who used them. I even tried it out on a 2nd grader who needed some remediation and she went to town on it as well. So what's so good about these? Let me count the ways: 1) Quantity: there are 30 different cards, which means that its not so many that your kids will get lost, but not so few that they'll finish them

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.

I know you all love "Task Cards" - so I made these for you, but at the same time, I had to get "snarky." Forgive me..... See all those stoopid questions that show up on Facebook, Instagram, PInterest, Friendster, Tumblr, Twitter, Woof, etc? The ones where they tell you to calculate some easy-peasy problem and then 83% get the wrong answer? Wouldn't that make a great activity for reviewing order of operations, a.k.a. PEMDAS????? So I collected a whole bunch of these, spread them over a few pag

There are few things in my life that I find more boring than the Common Core State Standards, better known by my the acronym of my own invention, “CoCoStaSta.” Well, I’m sure there is something more boring, like watching anything produced by Khan Academy, but I guess I’m setting a pretty low bar. This is a lesson I wrote for a friend who needed a sure-shot way to impress the grand mystic imperial poo-bahs who rule the fiefdom known as his public school. I think it is such a good lesson that I’

This packet is my way of serving all masters concerning the implications of summer math work: it has a limited number of activities that are not high stress - in fact, it’s five different games, some classic (Picos, Fermis and Bagels, Salute! & PIG!) and others that will be “new to you” (By the Digits, Close to 100), as well as a geometry puzzle featuring the Sphinx puzzle pieces.  Here’s what you get: • Picos, Fermis and Bagels: This is based on the board game “Mastermind,” which challenges

Do you give summer math work to your students? If so, I imagine it's probably a bunch of those cruddy worksheets that you downloaded off the InterWeb, printed out and told your students to complete for next year's teacher by the beginning of school. You know that your students won't use these, and will more than likely wait to the last minute to rush through them and do a crappo job. So what's the alternative? Well, you could send home this pack o' stuff: there's all kinds of fun stuff to keep

This activity was developed for a teacher whose students were having trouble distinguishing between "divide into groups of 5" and "divide into 5 groups...." To help with this, I designed these task cards for her students; working in pairs, they selected a card from a bowl, which could say things like "use 15 pennies: divide them into groups of 3" or "use 15 pennies; divide them into 3 groups." On their "record sheet," the students have a space to draw their solution and then write the equation w

This has been very successful for me both as an assessment and an activity that students can do at centers or at home. There are 10 different story problems, and a board with 10 spots to place them: each one states the operation you would use to solve it. Your students cut out the cards, they read the problems and then tape or glue the correct problem with the operation or operations that would be used to solve it. Most are single step problems, but some require two steps. A fun thing to do in c

Yes, you saw it with rats, turkeys and reindeers; fact it, you're eventually going to buy one of these, so why not snowmen and snowballs? NO JOKES PLEASE! Okay, the concept is simple: take the snowballs numbered from 1 - 6 and arrange them on the three sides so that each side adds up to 9. Rearrange them and they add up to 10. Do it again, and they add up to 11. Then do it one more time and they add up to 12. Record your results and see for the patterns that emerge in the corner numbers. Want

This activity features at least 1 Billion (that's 1,000,000,000) different long division problems. How did I do it? Answer: a very, very small font! All kidding aside, this is an incredibly expandable activity that has an unlimited number of puzzles, with each puzzle having several different solutions. Students start with a blank long division problem, with blanks left where the divisor and dividend should be. Some blanks are not too sophisticated: it may be a single digit divisor into a double

Our hero Samantha Sagacious: Number Detective, returns with 10 new mysteries, but this time she has a new tool at her disposal: the 1 - 100 chart. Your students will love solving each of these mysteries one at a time, either solo or in pairs at learning centers. Comes complete with answer key, and a set of "Do It Yourself" riddles that your students can create (and send to me!) for publication. Samantha Sagacious Rocks!

Tired of the old "make a flat" game? Do you want your kids to enjoy learning about and using place value? Close to a Flat challenges children to think about place value when planning strategy to win a game: in 5 rounds a student chooses between cubes and rods to get as close to making a flat as possible, or in 6 rounds, choosing cubes, rods and flats to make a thousand cube. This game includes puzzles for kids to take home, as well as mats to keep track of cubes, rods and flats. There is also a