Do you like Pinterest? I’ve enjoyed exploring the site lately, so I set up a few boards where I can pin the goodies I find. It may take awhile before I get all the old games and posts from this blog loaded up, so save the links and come back often…
Playful Math Games & Activities
As our children (and their parents!) play around with mathematical ideas and the relationships between them, we develop deep understanding that is strong enough to support future learning. Playful math links include math games, activities, and interesting lesson plans.
- Playful Math for Preschool & Early Elementary
- Playful Math for Upper Elementary & Middle School
- Playful Math for Middle & High School
Math Doodling
Making abstract math visual: Math doodles let us see and experiment with a wide range of mathematical structures — and even to feel them, if we include hands-on 3D doodles in clay or other media. Links include art projects, geometry constructions, and physical models to explore.
Math Teaching Tips & Resources
A variety of math teaching ideas for homeschool families or classroom teachers. Learning mathematics is more than just answer-getting: help your students make conceptual connections. These links are more “schooly” than on the other boards, and they include conceptual lessons that build your own understanding of mathematics as well as that of your students. And math notebooking resources, too.
MTaP Math Education Blog Carnival Archive
Since early 2009, the Math Teachers at Play (MTaP) blog carnival has offered tips, tidbits, games, and activities for students and teachers of preschool through pre-college mathematics. Now published once a month, the carnival welcomes entries from parents, students, teachers, homeschoolers, and just plain folks. If you like to learn new things and play around with ideas, you are sure to find something of interest.
Math-Ed Quotes
Inspiration for homeschooling parents and classroom teachers. This is where I’m posting my Wednesday Wisdom quotes.
And that’s the end of my Pinterest boards (so far).
What are some of your favorite Pinterest sites? Please share a link in the comments!
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 
Oh this is awesome! I can’t wait to look through all these pins. Your blog is full of great ideas for math. We use the pattern site you recommended often, and I really enjoyed the post about putting a million and billion on the number line. My kids enjoyed it too. I created a fun skip-counting card game called Speed! Here’s the link if you would like to add it to your math game boards – http://highhillhomeschool.blogspot.de/p/highhill-educational-supplies.html
– Julie
Thanks, Julie. Your game does look like it would be fun. Though my daughter always preferred slower games, because for her it was stressful to race against a clock or another player. Do you have alternative rules for play that don’t involve racing?
Right now, I’m just pinning ideas that are free or nearly free (may involve buying craft supplies), but I might consider putting up a collection of favorite products sometime…
Can you pin a pinterest board? I guess not. I have this board http://www.pinterest.com/blwoodley/formula-toy/ but I don’t think you can pin it.
Perhaps this post on my FormulaToy will be of interest to your high-schoolers:
http://rwoodley.org/?p=773
That’s the age group I had in mind when I built FormulaToy.
I’ve been homeschooling my son since a couple of years (and successfully if I may add, thankfully!) but it’s Maths which has always posed a problem from as far back as I can remember. And since the subject was not exactly in my list of favorite subjects back in school days, I feel as if I ought to put in all the more effort into it from my end. Here’s how I generally go about it:
1. From the beginning itself, I’ve tried to make Math a fun subject. As in, I began to introduce him to fractions while we were baking cookies in the kitchen, and was surprised how fast he picked it up.
2. Daily worksheets are a part of the curriculum I have set up. We discuss a chapter for a while and then I give him practice worksheets to solve (very basic ones to begin with) to see his grasp on the same.
3. Recently I’ve begun to use our computer at home as a math resource. You’ll probably not believe it, but I used to make worksheets from scratch in the earliest days of my homeschooling, and now I find websites like http://www.mathblaster.com/ which have ready-made worksheets on practically every chapter you can think of, for elementary education. Makes things really simpler for a mom like me who has a dozen things to do, at any given moment of the day (I’m pretty sure all moms face the same predicament, at some time or the other).
Also, I try to keep myself abreast of all my friend moms who also homeschool their kids; it’s surprising how each one of them (including me) follows a different approach, you get to learn such a lot from everyone.
By the way, really liked your math doodling idea, first time I’ve come across such a term.
Thanks for a great post!
Even better than worksheets for practicing: play a game! For many people, worksheet math doesn’t connect to real life, but the kind of thinking we do in playing a game helps build mental connections. All of my age/grade level pinterest pages include games, and you can find a lot of math games on my blog. Have fun!