SamizdatMath

To quote Charles Dickens (from The Pickwick Papers) “What fresh misery is this?” This is what happens when you have time on your hands and you’re thinking to yourself, “well, how can I bring bles’sed torment unto my students this week?” Many (many) years ago I had a student in my sixth grade class (you probably had them) who would respond to any “do now” problem with a quick look and the brag “oh, this is so easy!” And then after fumbling his way through 3 or 4 methods, all featuring a lapse of

From the same wiseguy who brought you "Fractions: You're Teaching It Wrong," "Multiplication: You're Teaching It Wrong (and you really don't have to...), among other deals, I now present unto you, "Division: Take My Word For It, You're Teaching It Wrong." It's 62 pages long! Okay, half of those pages are printable "division facts reminder & practice cards, but still, that's a lot of division for you to digest. 13 concrete techniques that you can implement into your classroom tomorrow, or, even

ALL KILLER - NO FILLER! This is the all the materials you need to teach a killer, do you hear me, KILLER lesson where students will identify and practice sorting 4 different addition strategies. The strategies: "Count On" "Doubles" "Near Doubles" "Make Ten" What I love about this lesson is that it reviews these 4 strategies without having the teacher name them directly: instead, you place examples of each strategy on separate areas and then ask the students to create more

Stop That Rat! ? Why would anyone want to "stop that rat?" Well, because it's really fun to watch your students work on this puzzle, which comes in gritty color as well as black and white. 63 pages of rat fun! Seriously, the basic puzzle is simple: take the disks which are numbered 1 - 6, and arrange them on the board so that each side adds up to 9. However, things get very interesting when you find out that you can re-arrange the 6 numbers to add up to 10, 11 and 12. But it gets better than th

Do your students need practice identifying and solving problems using coins? From the same person who brought you "Coin KenKen," I now have "Ultra Coin KenKen," where students place pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters on 4 x 4 grids to equal different totals. Complete with answer key AND a "Do It Yourself" template so you and your students can create and share your own puzzles.

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

Straight out of Gowanus, Brooklyn, here are bright & beautiful illustrated subway cars that can be connected to make a train of number facts. NOW IN COLOR! I've taken these specialty created subway illustrations (available NOWHERE ELSE!) and re-touched them in beautiful color ready to be printed, laminated and cut. Keep them for a lifetime! Print out each set of b& w subway cards on a different colored card stock (to keep them sorted) and challenge children to a variety of different skip count

RIO is a game based on the work of Constance Kamii to help children develop skills in using skip counting on their way to memorizing multiplication facts; there are games for skip counting by 3's, 4's, 5's, 6's, 7's, 8's and 9's, as well as instructions on how to differentiate between "conceptual facts" and "associated pairs." In full color!

I created this activity about 10 years ago, and if you ask me, I’ll make it even better (except the original file is in ClarisWorks and can’t be edited.) But you see the idea: there are puzzles with blank numbers, and you cut out the ones on the side and figure out how to place them so they will “make sense.” I developed this activity for a class of mainstream kids who were struggling with addition and subtraction and were getting tired of endless, repetitive, mind-draining, mood-defeating drill