# Playing With Math — the Book

Update: The crowdfunding campaign is now closed and the book is in the final stages. It should be headed to the printer soon. Check the Playing With Math homepage for publication and ordering information.

There are only a few days left to reserve your copy of Playing With Math: Stories from Math Circles, Homeschoolers, and Passionate Teachers. I don’t have time to finish the review I hoped to write, so instead I’ll share some of my favorite quotes from the book:

What do mathematicians do? We play with math. What are little kids doing when they’re thinking about numbers, shapes, and patterns? They’re playing with math. You may not believe it yet, but you can have fun playing with math, too.

— Sue VanHattum, editor

We had a discussion at the end of the club on how we are all confused now, but pleasantly so, and how important it is to rejoice in confusion and to be comfortable with it. Adults often strive very hard to get rid of any and all possible traces of confusion for kids, making things dreadfully boring.

— Maria Droujkova, after a math circle exploration of infinity

All it talkes to do mathematics is opportunity, a frustrating problem, and a bit of stubbornness.

— Ellen Kaplan, math circle leader

Our own school experiences can make it hard for us to teach without being tempted to “help them master” a concept that they may or may not be ready to master. What we never learned in school was the concept of playing around with math, allowing ideas to “percolate,” so to speak, before mastery occurs, and that process may take time.

— Julie Brennan, homeschooler

# Playing With Math: Stories from Math Circles, Homeschoolers, and Passionate Teachers

Update: The crowdfunding campaign is now closed and the book is in the final stages. It should be headed to the printer soon. Check the Playing With Math homepage for publication and ordering information.

There’s a problem: Most people don’t like math. Why is that? Perhaps it has something to do with the way math is taught in school. As a teacher to my own kids and mentor to homeschooling parents, I’ve been fighting math anxiety for decades.

This book is one part of the solution.

Playing With Math: Stories from Math Circles, Homeschoolers, and Passionate Teachers features more than thirty authors who tell delightful stories of learning to appreciate math and of sharing their enthusiasm with their communities, families, or students. After every chapter is a puzzle, game, or activity to get you and your kids playing with math, too.

You can read a couple of excerpts at PlayingWithMath.org:

Whether you love math and want to share it with your kids, or whether you fear and loathe math and need help getting over that hurdle so you won’t pass your fear on, Playing With Math will encourage you to see math more deeply and play with it more freely.

I’ve been waiting for this book for years, and I’m thrilled to see it finally come together. As I read the advance copy (review coming soon!), I am amazed at how many different ways there are to think about math. Each writer has a new perspective and unique insight, and my quotes journal is filling up with inspiration.

Today is the first day of our crowd-funding campaign. For a contribution of $25, we’ll send you a book as soon as it’s printed. You can contribute anything from$1 to $5000 (with rewards at each contribution level) to help us pay for our illustrators, editors, page layout person, and printing. This is our way of asking for community support for this book as part of the production process. We hope to build lots of energy around the ideas in the book through this campaign. Besides contributing, here’s another way you can help: Think of five friends who would enjoy this book. • Do you have friends who get frustrated helping their kids with math homework? • Or who teach young kids but don’t feel comfortable with math themselves? • Do you have friends who enjoy math? • Or who want ideas to share with the kids in their lives? • Do you know someone who might want to start a math circle? Would you send them a quick message, to let them know we’re here? I’m hoping for the power of exponential growth with this. Our outrageous goal is to change the way people all over this country, and maybe even the world, think about math. If you each send this to five friends who might enjoy the book, and each of them sends it to five friends, and each of them … Well, pretty soon we cover the world, right? In fact, if we kept it going through eleven steps, that would make 5 to the 11th power, or over 40 million people. Does Sue dream big? Yep. Get monthly math tips and activity ideas, and be the first to hear about new books, revisions, and sales or other promotions. Sign up for my Tabletop Academy Press Updates email list. # Talking Math with Your Kids Christopher Danielson, one of my favorite math bloggers, has a new book out that is perfect for parents of preschool and elementary-age children: It’s a short book with plenty of great stories, advice, and conversation-starters. While Danielson writes directly to parents, the book will also interest grandparents, aunts & uncles, teachers, and anyone else who wants to help children notice and think about math in daily life. You don’t need special skills to do this. If you can read with your kids, then you can talk math with them. You can support and encourage their developing mathematical minds. You don’t need to love math. You don’t need to have been particularly successful in school mathematics. You just need to notice when your children are being curious about math, and you need some ideas for turning that curiosity into a conversation. In nearly all circumstances, our conversations grow organically out of our everyday activity. We have not scheduled “talking math time” in our household. Instead, we talk about these things when it seems natural to do so, when the things we are doing (reading books, making lunch, riding in the car, etc) bump up against important mathematical ideas. The dialogues in this book are intended to open your eyes to these opportunities in your own family’s life. — Christopher Danielson Talking Math with Your Kids Get monthly math tips and activity ideas, and be the first to hear about new books, revisions, and sales or other promotions. Sign up for my Tabletop Academy Press Updates email list. # How To Master Quadratic Equations feature photo above by Junya Ogura via flickr (CC BY 2.0) A couple of weeks ago, James Tanton launched a wonderful resource: a free online course devoted to quadratic equations. (And he promises more topics to come.) Kitten and I have been working through the lessons, and she loves it! We’re skimming through pre-algebra in our regular lessons, but she has enjoyed playing around with simple algebra since she was in kindergarten. She has a strong track record of thinking her way through math problems, and earlier this year she invented her own method for solving systems of equations with two unknowns. I would guess her background is approximately equal to an above-average algebra 1 student near the end of the first semester. After few lessons of Tanton’s course, she proved — within the limits of experimental error — that a catenary (the curve formed by a hanging chain) cannot be described by a quadratic equation. Last Friday, she easily solved the following equations: $\left ( x+4 \right )^2 -1=80$ and: $w^2 + 90 = 22 w - 31$ and (though it took a bit more thought): $4x^2 + 4x + 4 = 172$ We’ve spent less than half an hour a day on the course, as a supplement to our AoPS Pre-Algebra textbook. We watch each video together, pausing occasionally so she can try her hand at an equation before listening to Tanton’s explanation. Then (usually the next day) she reads the lesson and does the exercises on her own. So far, she hasn’t needed the answers in the Companion Guide to Quadratics, but she did use the “Dots on a Circle” activity — and knowing that she has the answers available helps her feel more independent. # Moebius Noodles: New Must-Read Math Book Homeschoolers, after-schoolers, unschoolers, or anyone else: if you’re a parent with kids at home, you need this book. If you work with children in any way (grandparent, aunt/uncle, teacher, child care, baby sitter, etc.) you need this book. Or if you hated math in school and never understood how anyone could enjoy it, you need this book! Moebius Noodles is a travel guide to the Math Universe for adventurous families (and it has lots of beautiful pictures, too!) featuring games and activities that draw out the rich, mathematical properties of everyday objects in ways accessible to parents and children: • A snowflake is an example of a fractal and an invitation to explore symmetry. • Cookies offer combinatorics and calculus games. • Paint chips come in beautiful gradients, and floor tiles form tessellations. # Review: The Mathematics of Free Books [Photo by Casey Fleser.] When I first heard about Swagbucks, I figured there had to be a catch. How could they give away real money just for using their search engine? But over the past four years, I’ve collected nearly$600 worth of freebies, mostly for doing internet searches I would have done anyway.

I trade in my Swagbucks for Amazon.com gift certificates, with which I’ve bought Christmas gifts, printer ink, groceries, and (splurging on myself!) several math books, including Paul Lockhart’s new Measurement.

Would you like to earn free books, too? Check it out:

• Swagbucks Search & Win
[To get a quick 50 Swagbucks, enter the code “SPRINGIN2SWAG” (for April 2013) when you sign up.]

# Let’s Play Math Book Update

I love math, but had forgotten why I developed a love for math in the first place. This book made me realize how experiences in my childhood lit a spark in me … Denise Gaskins shows us how we can ignite this fire in our own children.

I believe her suggestions are invaluable for homeschoolers, but essential for the many parents whose children are learning to dislike math in school.

If you’ve wavered on whether to pick up my math book, be warned: This is the last month for the introductory sale price. In January, the price will go up to \$5.99 — which is still much less than what the original edition sells for, used.

Of course, if you’re a member of Amazon Prime, you can borrow the book (or my daughter’s novel) for free!

You don’t need a Kindle to read an Amazon.com ebook. You can access it on your computer, tablet, or smart phone using Amazon’s Kindle Cloud Reader or a Kindle Reading App.