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Family Math Night Collaborative Project: Rose Window

Family Math Night Collaborative Project: Rose Window

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I’m very excited to share with you my latest Family Math Night Collaborative Project: Rose Window. I was inspired to do this project after visiting the beautiful Chartres Cathedral in France.

Here is the final result:

The theme for this rose window is geometry and fractions. I can’t think of a more fun way to get in some important work in fractions! As with each of my Family Math Night Collaborative Projects, I put together a video where I walk you through each of the three activities and give tips on station set-up.

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Family Math Night Project Series: Bug Box

Family Math Night Project Series: Bug Box

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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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What Do You Notice? poster – Fractions on the Geoboard

What Do You Notice? poster – Fractions on the Geoboard

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Skills:
K-2: shapes, counting, area
3-5: congruency, area, fractions, equivalent fractions

This is similar to the Squares and More Squares poster. Like that one, this was designed around fractions but at a higher level. The dots for each square represent the dots on a regular geoboard. Each square is made up of 5 by 5 dots. If lines were drawn connecting each of the dots, the larger square would show 16 small squares (4 x 4 small squares). Each of these small squares represents one square unit.

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Family Math Night Collaborative Project: Space Invaders

Family Math Night Collaborative Project: Space Invaders

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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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What Do You Notice? Descriptions

What Do You Notice? Descriptions

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What Do You Notice? Rectangular Arrays

Skills:
Primary students (K-2): shapes, counting, repeated addition, area
Intermediate students (3-5): classifying quadrilaterals, area model of multiplication, multiplication, prime, composite, and square numbers

It’s been on my TO DO list for a long time. Years, in fact. But I’ve finally checked it off and I’m thrilled with the results.

As many of you know, for each of my Family Math Night events I include a What Do You Notice? poster. These posters are designed to get kids and parents thinking about math on a deeper level. Although each poster has been included on our website, there has never been details…until now. I’ve taken each of the posters and written a thorough description of the math involved. I’ve also included the specific skills by grade span, K-2 and 3-5, and given several examples of student responses.

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