Back in the early 2000s, my husband and I joined forces, he as a software engineer and me as a teacher, to design a kids savings and money management software program. We called it KidsSave. In that program we included a fun way to teach kids basic money skills. It was such a powerful tool that we decided to include it for free on our kids and money website. One of my favorite features of the KidsSave Money Counter is…
So for this What Do You Notice? poster, I decided to tie in rectangular arrays with prime and composite numbers. That said, whatever math-y thing students notice is totally acceptable. For example, one student noticed that the “buildings” had square windows. Great. That’s a little bit of geometry. Another student noticed that each set of colored rectangles included the same number of squares. Again, great, as that required some counting and comparison. Just like the student who noticed that there are…
Here’s my latest What Do You Notice? poster from a recent Family Math Night event. The nice thing about these posters is that they’re open-ended which allows for anyone to respond. For this one, I decided to make a venn diagram. But I didn’t draw the usual circles. Instead I drew two hexagons. This created the rhombus (parallelogram) in the center. The categories I used for the numbers were even numbers and multiples of 5. That said, anything appropriate would have…
I hired my youngest son, Ryan, for the summer. When your kids get older they don’t hang out with you as much so we have to find ways to keep them around. I find money works. :-)But hiring him was really a win/win. He needed a job and I needed help. So he’s been keeping track of the hours he’s worked and every couple of weeks we square things up. Yesterday he reminded me that I owe him $100 for…
Subitizing is being able to quickly recognize how many objects are in a small set without having to count the objects. In this short video I show how to use dot cards, dice, 10-frames, and dominoes in developing number sense skills so important for success in mathematics. .