SamizdatMath

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 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

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

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