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Monday, January 30, 2012

Math Monday Blog Hop #42 (January 30, 2012)






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Friday, January 27, 2012

Happy New Year! (Dragons!)

Celebrating Lunar New Year? This art project  (and this!) provided us with great fun as we  commemorate the Year of the Dragon. Here's our monster:



The dragon's scaly skin is formed by painting with bubble wrap. Fun medium!!

We've also been reading. Two of our favorite books this week...

  • The Knight and the Dragon (by a beloved author/illustrator, Tomie DePaola...this is also a great story to act out)
  • The Paper Dragon (with a beautiful moral...the strongest thing in the world is not dragons, but LOVE!)



I've also learned (by much trial and error) that the single most effective way to get children to draw is to sit down and draw with them. We got out the Prismacolor pencils yesterday. Here's a 9-year-old's dragon (right.)

I'm also thinking about a math lesson...  How about a survey where students interview people of all ages to find out which animal under the Chinese calendar they were born? It'd be a great Facebook survey to do at home.

Happy New Year from someone born under the Chinese Calendar animal...

wait for it...

MONKEY! :)





(Photo taken at a garden in China.)










Linking up at stART.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Pinterest Site for Math Education (+Tessellations!)

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I've succumbed. Pinterest has grabbed me. Almost my entire Pinterest site is dedicated to math. Feel free to follow along. The goodie I found this morning? An unbelievable site showing origami masks and tessellations...incredible 3D artwork "sculptures" each entirely created from 1 piece of paper. It'd be great to show students as you explore tessellation lessons. The sample below comes from one of my lessons; I had each student in my class decorate a fish to make into a tessellated poster.


Monday, January 23, 2012

Math Monday Blog Hop #41 (January 23, 2012)







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Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Part-Whole Math With a Plate!

At a conference last fall, I heard Kim Sutton mention something about using Zoo Pal Paper Plates to show parts and whole in math. She briefly described putting the parts in the ears and then showing the whole in the larger plate area. I'm not exactly sure how she uses the plates. But I wanted to experiment with the idea...

I couldn't find the zoo plates locally (Amazon link is below), but decided to try it with a plastic plate from a local one buck store. (My plate is sorta like this divided plastic picnic plate.) I've used this a couple different ways to explore the part-whole relationship in addition with my 5yo...

With Dice:
He tossed one die into each of the smaller compartments and put that many items (I used centimeter cubes) in each dish. He wrote down the two dice numbers in an addition number sentence. So if he rolled "2" and "3," he put 2 cubes in one small slot, 3 in the other small slot and wrote "2 + 3." He then moved all the cubes to the bigger area (the whole) to count the total and finish the number sentence (= 5.)


With Pre-Written Number Sentences & Penguin Pieces: 
I wrote several number sentences. (Photo above models 2+2.) If the sentence was 2 + 4, he counted out 2 marble penguins into the first small compartment and 4 marble penguins into the second small compartment. He then moved all the penguins into the larger compartment, counted the total and finished his number sentence.

This could easily be replicated at home or school. And could be used with subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals and more. Enjoy!

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Monday, January 16, 2012

Math Monday Blog Hop #40 (January 16, 2012)





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Monday, January 9, 2012

Math Monday Blog Hop #39 (January 9, 2012)





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Saturday, January 7, 2012

Cure for Bored Kids (Rube Goldberg-esque machine)

Are your children bored? If you don't mind pin holes in your walls, challenge them with this video:



It reminds me of making marble rolls. And of our Frigits marble roll.  But, Wow!

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Math Monday Blog Hop #38 (January 2, 2012)





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Sunday, January 1, 2012

Teaching Dimensions - Great YouTube Movie

My 3rd grader asked, "What's a dimension?" I think he was reflecting on the 3D shapes we've been considering in math. We had a brief conversation about it, but this movie really helped...and thoroughly intrigued both of us.



Happy New Year!!