Here’s a fun activity you can send home with your families to do over the summer that will keep math alive – a math scavenger hunt. I’ve done it many times at our local Family Math Night events and it’s a HUGE hit. When we do this at our events, students receive the scavenger hunt activity sheet and a pencil and, working with their parent/caregiver they go on a hunt for math items. This is a great way for students…
I know I’ve said it before, but math combined with art is always a huge hit at our Family Math Night events. It’s the reason why we included at least one crafty math activity in each of our event kits. In addition to those in the event kits, I’ve also created over 20 individual math/art activities that are fun to include at your Family Math Night event. Here’s my latest – designed around my summertime frame of mind: Beach Ball Fractions. This was a super fun…
Dinner + Math We all know that parents are busy people. Any opportunity to make their lives easier and, well, they’re usually in. So let’s take dinner off their plate (!) and feed them. A spaghetti feed works well. But if you want to make it easy, bring in pizza or, even better, have a local restaurant donate the food. You can pass out their restaurant coupons at the Family Math Night sending customers in their direction. It’s a win/win! If you do decide to offer…
Math and art. It’s always a huge hit at our Family Math Night events. Since we were using our Gellin’ with Geometry kit and the event was in the spring, I decided to tie geometry and spring together and came up with a springtime symmetry activity. Enter our insect friends. The type of symmetry I focused on was bilateral symmetry. It’s the same as mirror or reflection symmetry except that when it comes to biological creatures – like our insect friends – biologists call…
I’m always looking for ways to combine math and art into a fun activity. I’m also always looking for ways to show students that we’re surrounded by math in ways we aren’t necessarily aware of. That brings me to a recent Family Math Night Collaborative Project. In this project I used the Fibonacci numbers to have participants create a Fibonacci Flower Garden. Fibonacci numbers are a sequence of numbers that are generated by adding the previous two numbers starting with 0 and…