There is a meme for about everything today. Regardless of your social network of choice, sometimes-amusing graphics are everywhere. Why not use them to teach math? The font of all things meme, CHEEZburger, has a GraphJam section full of graph and diagram memes. Perhaps you are teaching pie charts. You could start with this. You … Continue reading
Yes, I’m a long-term Beatles fan. I was a young girl when they first appeared on the old Ed Sullivan Show. Who could resist, really? But now I have a new reason to love the classic song, “Hey Jude”: Lucidchart’s “Lyrical Flowchart,” available on YouTube. Lucidchart is a company that prepares online diagramming software. To … Continue reading
Sometimes it can be easy to think, “Creativity is fine for art class or writing, but not math. Creativity in math is for Einstein, not middle school.” If you’ve ever been tempted to think such thoughts, take 5 minutes and watch Annie Fetter at an NCTM Ignite session. She describes a math lesson based on … Continue reading
Math in the News is exactly what it sounds like—a website, with related weekly newsletter—that uses math to explore issues in the news. Produced by Media4Math, Math in the News activities range from probability maps predicting landfall for Hurricane Sandy to an exploration of pumpkin costs per hundredweight or the statistics of the presidential election. … Continue reading
It is nearly Thanksgiving time in Michigan, and so, of course, all thoughts turn to feasting. All across the United States people are contemplating turkey, stuffing, pie and—delicious numbers? Possibly. Because today’s post features the appropriately titled website, Yummy Math. Yummy Math focuses on bringing real-world thinking and problem solving into the classroom. It is … Continue reading
It is easy to mistake adding and subtracting for math. Or (oh, the horror of it!) long division. So many of us have spent long hours as students, or maybe even as teachers, drilling the basics of computation that we can lose track of the wonder of numbers. And it is the wonder that makes … Continue reading
Class blogs can be a fabulous way to motivate students to write and to provide families with insight into your class. Sites like Edublogs and Kidblog make it easy to get started. But if students are to blog safely, it is important to have clear and effective blogging guidelines. Luckily, such things are not hard … Continue reading
For the last few weeks I’ve been writing about teaching for creativity and the Common Core State Standards. The Common Core State Standards Initiative outlines core math and language arts content to be addressed at each grade level. In my first Common Core post, I clarified that the Common Core State Standards are not intended … Continue reading
It is a classic line: If the teacher is bored, we have a problem! In this guest post, Melanie Carbine describes a math lesson that is an example of both creative teaching, and teaching for creativity. Like many creative activities, it emerged from a moment of need. Here’s Melanie. I had a month substituting for … Continue reading
Warning! The Scale of the Universe is addictive. You may have trouble pulling yourself away from this fascinating exploration of size, scale, and relationships. It takes a moment to load, but once it does, it presents items in order of size, from quantum foam at 1X10-35 meters, past microbes, ants, giant earthworms, the Titanic, and … Continue reading
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