Seven books, #StreetMath, Dinosaur+Cat: Newsletter June 30, 2013

Posted on June 30, 2013 by

I am Moby Snoodles, and this is my newsletter. I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com

Books

A small team of dreamers is planning, talking, and writing a story of their math adventures. Several dozen supportive parents and math circle leaders get together for an open online course to modify the adventures for their kids. Everybody’s math creations, loving adaptations, and comments on the story crystallize in the next draft. The project is announced to the world in a crowd-funding campaign. Artist-mathematicians add illustrations, copy-editors do their magic, a team of volunteers comments on pre-prints – and you can enjoy the next young math book!

Where along this path are our book projects?

A sketch of the cover

Playing with Math, edited by Sue VanHattum, is an anthology of stories from math circles, free schools, and homeschooling families. We are preparing its crowd-funding campaign while finishing copy-editing and illustrations.

Problem Solving for the Young, the Very Young, and the Young At Heart by James Tanton, Maria Droujkova and Yelena McManaman is a collection of ten principles of solving mathematical problems. We are running the open online course for it, mpsMOOC13, this July.

Art of Inquiry by Julia Brodsky is a collection of math activities for developing insight, mental agility, and openness. We had it tested with a few math club leaders, and now we are getting ready for a bigger online course.

The sequel to The Cat in Numberland by Ivar Ekeland will be a story to read to young kids. Ivar will choose the Cat’s destination in the next few weeks; future readers are already helping!

Variables and More by Gordon Hamilton and Malke Rosenfeld is a collection of early algebra activities on variety, variations, and variables! SubQuan by Cooper Patterson and Rebecca Reiniger is about a new system for exploring powers, different bases, and the foundations of number systems. Binary Weights by Olga Radko is a carefully arranged sequence of problems for exploring the binary system. These book names are not final. These books are at the start of the journey, nurtured by the small teams.

Ask Moby Snoodles

Is 2.5 years too young for a math lesson?

Binary Numbers Activities

Blogs and more

Check out the #StreetMath tag on Facebook for infinite hopscotch, double Dutch jump rope, and Chinlone. Add this tag to your posts when you find any street math!

Carollee spreads the word about our problem-solving course at the Focus on Math blog.

“Parents, if you are interested in some math fun that encourages some great learning, you will want to check out this site– Moebius Noodles: Math Adventures. It sounds like a great opportunity to me! What’s not to love about more math!!!”

Nicole of Creating Curiosity blog shares a joyful algebra morning with the kids.

One morning, Delaney was making up silly math problems for me.

“What’s a dinosaur plus a cat?”
“A Dino-Cat!”

“What is a gazillion jillion plus a million?”
“A Gazijillion Million”

I asked her, “What’s 2x plus 3x?”
She cracked up at my ridiculousness, and told me it was 5x.

A few of my favorite math blogs are Let’s Play Math and Moebius Noodles. They both stress the importance of letting kids play with numbers and concepts. It is amazing how our brains work and put together concepts through playing with them, and how those same concepts become difficult to learn as an older student looking at a problem set. This 10 minute conversation of ours was a perfect example to me of how letting the girls do a little bit of silly problem solving can lead to the understanding of much bigger things, even at the ages of 4 1/2 and 2!

Sharing

You are welcome to share the contents of this newsletter online or in print. You can also remix and tweak anything as you wish, as long as you share your creations on the same terms. Please credit MoebiusNoodles.com

More formally, we distribute all Moebius Noodles content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: CC BY-NC-SA