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Family Math Night Home Edition – SPANISH version

Family Math Night Home Edition – SPANISH version

I’m excited to share with you that the PDFs for all the Home Edition activities have been translated into Spanish. A HUGE thank you to Carley Beale and her staff from Virginia for taking on the project! They did an amazing job. Click here to access the PDFs which can be found listed under the video once you click on an activity.

As I described in my Family Math Night Home Edition post, my goal was to design the Family Math Night/Day to be different than simply doing a math activity at the kitchen table. It’s their own personal event and I walk them through how to do it step-by-step. And now our Spanish community can join in the fun!

I hope this helps you keep families engaged in discovering the wonders of math together during this time of continued uncertainty.

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Family Math Night Home Edition

Family Math Night Home Edition

Family Math Nights are usually done at school but I created one that families can do at home. This comprehensive resource includes video tutorials, check lists, materials lists, and activity sheets for four home-friendly activities for grades K-5. I’m including the video below.

My goal was to design the Family Math Night/Day to be different than simply doing a math activity at the kitchen table. It’s their own personal event and I walk them through how to do it step-by-step. Watch the video below for tips on making it a special event.


Here is the link so you can access all the activity PDFs:
https://familymathnight.com/resources/mathathome.php

Here is the link so you can access the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GknJtgZ47KQ

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Family Math Night Project Series: Bug Box

Family Math Night Project Series: Bug Box


I’m very excited to share with you our newest Family Math Night product line designed around hands-on projects in math. We’re calling it our Project Series and the first one, just released, is Project: Bug Box.


Hands-on and super fun, this Family Math Night Bug Box station will get the creative juices flowing! Participants choose one of their favorite (plastic!) bugs and use 2- and 3-dimensional geometry along with number skills to create a rectangular prism. Participants will walk away with a custom designed box for their bug which they get to bring home and share with others.

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Family Math Night Collaborative Project: Space Invaders

Family Math Night Collaborative Project: Space Invaders

I’m excited to share with you my latest Family Math Night Collaborative Project: Space Invaders. Here’s a photo of the final result. (There are actually 3 aliens to choose from in the lesson plan. This is alien #1).



Here’s some of the background information I include in the lesson plan:

In 1978, Tomohiro Nishikado, a Japanese video game developer, released his video game Space Invaders. It was such a popular game that it helped catapult video gaming into a global industry. The pixelated aliens in the game became a popular icon.

Pixels are small single-colored squares that make up images in computer graphics. These pixels are displayed as a bitmap, a rectangular matrix of dots. These pixels, sometimes called dots, are each assigned a specific color and are arranged along the horizontal axis (x-coordinate) and vertical axis (y-coordinate) of the matrix.
Computer graphics have come a long way in the last decade and look much more sophisticated today than they did back in 1978. But back when graphics were first being designed on computers, they had a “boxy” look. That’s because the screen displays (screen resolutions) were not as good as they are today.

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The Power of the Estimation Jar

The Power of the Estimation Jar


We often think of math as the exact-answer subject. But the kind of math that we do most often during the day doesn’t require an exact answer. We use this particular math skill when we need to figure out how much time we need to get ready in the morning. Or whether we have enough gas in the car to get to work. Or whether $50 is enough to cover the items in our shopping cart.

The math skill we use the most is, of course, estimation. And estimating accurately requires a high level of math. That’s because it’s abstract which means we need to tap into our number sense and reasoning skills.

One way to provide our students with opportunities to work on their estimation skills is during computation practice. Instead of diving right in to figure out 15 x 12, have students come up with an estimate…about what the answer will be. In fact, periodically I ask students NOT to determine the exact answer and, instead, have them turn in their work with only their estimates recorded. This is hard for them to do in the beginning because they are so used to working out arithmetic problems, but they soon learn the value in thinking about the problem first.

A fun way to get students to work on their estimating skills is through the estimation jar. I’ve included two of my estimation videos below. The first video describes using the estimation jar in the classroom as a way to develop, not only estimation skills, but place value and number sense, as well.

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