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Calculator Rant
My 14yo is a highly gifted math student. 4 years ago, if I’d asked him how many ways you could choose 3 people out of a group of 8, if order didn’t matter, he’d have reasoned something like this: Well,...
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Number Rainbows
Thanks to Denise at Let’s Play Math for bringing to my attention the very cool idea of Number Rainbows. Now these things are cool for a number of reasons. First, they’re beautiful. My youngest is a...
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Computing Square Roots by Hand
After writing a post about Multiplication, I was going to go off and write a post about the method I’d learned in middle school for computing a square root by hand. It looked a lot like long division,...
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Series differences, and fascinating facts
This week I tried a couple of ideas I got from MathNotations on my middle school group. First I presented this problem: How much greater is the sum of 51+52+53+…+100 than the sum of 1+2+3+…+50? Because...
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Skip-Counting for Numeracy
Most kids learn, in kindergarten or first grade, to count by 2’s, 5’s, 10’s. By rote. This has its uses, but going beyond that level of skip-counting can make great numeracy practice, and it seems to...
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Dr. Mike’s Big Numbers Contest
For the last day of school, we decided to have all the kids in the school (ages 5-14) spend 5 minutes on Dr. Mike’s “Big Numbers” contest. The rules, from Dr. Mike were: You may write anything at all...
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