Watchthe video below to see how simple objects like tiles, stickers, rubber stamps, dice, and graph paper help teach students important concepts in number theory: factors, primes, composites, and square numbers…not to mention the great reinforcement of multiplication facts. Grades 2 – 5 CCSS: 2.OA.4; 2.NBT.2; 3.OA.1; 3.OA.3; 3.OA.5; 3.OA.7; 4.OA.1; 4.OA.4
Meaningful math with a purpose! This great hands-on lesson gets students doing math while designing targets. Students become comfortable using the area formula for circles. And the best part is, their targets are set up and used during the school’s fall carnival. Watch the video below for the entire lesson plan. CCSS: 7.G.4 TEKS: 6th grade 6C, 8A, 8B Link to video. .
Kids love geometry. It’s so hands-on. At least, it should be. I can’t imagine trying to teach kids geometry without letting them draw, cut, design, build. 3-D geometry taught on paper? I don’t think so! Unless, of course, you’re designing nets. And that’s exactly what I did with a group of sixth graders. We were working on volume and I thought it would be fun to re-design the soda can. It required a lot of hands-on work that involved graph…
Mathematics and nature often go hand-in-hand. In this lesson, students study the spirals of the nautilus and tie it in to a numerical sequence called the Fibonacci sequence. They use the sequence to re-design the nautilus using home-made compasses. I begin the lesson by showing the first few terms of the Fibonacci sequence and have students work together to see if they can figure out the pattern and the next few numbers in the sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5,…
Ancient Africans in Egypt enlarged pictures by using nets of squares. In this fun project, students re-construct a smaller picture into a very large picture. In mathematics, we call this dilation which is a type of trasformation studied in geometry. This is an activity I do with fourth graders and above. I first begin with a picture that I know the students will have fun re-constructing. Hence…Sponge Bob. Depending on the number of students who will be working on one…