Supplemental Math practice and games

So we have a math menu of sorts, to mix things up when there is too much book work. I'll list them from favorite to least favorite, but these were all welcome breaks from Saxon and Abeka.

Math for Fun- Discovering Patterns (with easy-to-make projects for fun math games)

You make some really cool patterns in multiplication, triangular numbers, Fibonacci sequence, and practice some algebraic thinking...it hardly felt like math. It was like being creative with numbers, but you're actually learning math concepts at the same time.

Math for Fun- Making Fractions (with easy-to-make projects for fun math games)
This explores fractions and percentages with a pizza to craft, noodles, "bricks" to make, mosaics...pretty fun.

M. C. Escher Kaleidocycles- Explore building some polyhedrons and tetrahedrons and all kinds of hedrons I guess with this kit- we didn't exactly learn a ton about the math behind the shapes but it was a real challenge turning these flat sheets into three-dimensional objects. It was neat to do it in the Escher prints rather than solid colors. You had to work to get the patterns lined up right sometimes. The accompanying book is written to an adult, so although interesting to explore how the pattern and colors were chosen, how he wrapped different designs around specific shapes, it's a bit of a yawn as a book for a 4th-6th grader. It was too much work for me to examine all of that book and disect it into manageable lessons. It was a great reference though and I basically used it to identify tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, and figure things out when Elli was stuck. There are better ways to actually teach these concepts and the math lessons, but this created a fantastic project. She was proud to have it displayed as a mobile for over a year.

Math Path Puzzles from MindwareOnline.com are the practice workbooks that Elli liked for practicing basic operations through a back door kind of way. Mindware rocks! They've got the best stuff. Love love love their catalog. Love our local store that carries many of the same products even more though.

Smath or a similar game Equate is a fun like Scrabble, only you write out math sentences (or equations). Elli picked this the other night for Family Fun Night, and that was a shocker. But now that she's moved on to simplifying equations in prealgebra, the game finally holds some appeal. Not so much fun for her when it was just basic operations.

Evan-Moor's Math with Nursery Rhymes for primary grades was fun for preschool. About half the class of kindergarteners thought it was babyish so we didn't use it a lot then. I loved the Lucy Locket game and the Jack-a-Dandy candy graphs. It even has a rock candy crystal experiment! I did like this. It also spurred my own creativity.

Irresistable 1, 2, 3s (by Scholastic) for preschool and kindergarten is quite resistable if you ask me. I found it rather basic, with boring ideas that you can find any number of places. The I Spy pictures idea is kind of fun (but we did it already), 101 Counting Jars is kind of fun, and I did like the Phone Book of Friends pages to photocopy. One thing I did use out of this (both in preschool and kindergarten), was the Mystery Number Game. This was actually a favorite math game in my class. You make sliding number lines for everyone out of tag board strips, and you let them guess at the mystery number. You give them clues (odd/even, higher/lower) until they figure it out. I let the winner do something special (hold the door open, win a jellybean, choose who was sitting ready to line up). You might find an idea or two that makes this book worth checking out at the library, but I wouldn't put it on my priority Book Wish List. There are fantastic free ideas out on the web from places like the perpetualpreschool.com.


What I'm hoping to get (I guess for baby Karson as he gets bigger rather than Grace now) are all the Froebel gifts. That is a fun way to explore math in a concrete way. Explore, compare, combine sizes of blocks to build freestyle, then fit them back into the original cube shape box. A free-play and a puzzle. See http://froebelusa.com/ for more information about Froebel gifts. Basically Froebel invented kindergarten and this method inspired Frank Lloyd Wright and many others. That's a totally basic introduction but I think it sums it up.

Oh, one more math book we used was called No Problem! It was helpful in teaching math problem solving, but dear daughter didn't like it either. That was the year she didn't like anything to do with math though, so maybe it was just her. It came highly recommended and I liked the way the book was laid out and concepts presented. It focused on one strategy at a time. Elli didn't think it was creative enough. Boring compared to the Math for Fun books, but better concepts and I think someone was just feeling lazy. I still like it.