A math circle journey, book news, and ways to play: Newsletter December 10, 2015

Posted on December 10, 2015 by

MariaD — No Comments ↓ Tagged with: newsletter

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Shelley Nash’s Blog Series: A Math Circle Journey

Meet Shelley Nash, mother of seven, math circle leader, and now Natural Math blogger! In her stories, you will find ideas to try at home or in your group, friendly advice for when things go wrong, and little anecdotes about children to warm your heart.

Love of Learning Math is about a group of young children exploring topics from the Moebius Noodles book such as function machines and mirror books. Download Shelley’s slides if you want to offer these topics to your children, but don’t know where to start.

Shelley also writes about her middle school and high school groups. Here are all the posts in the new series. Shelley would love to see a comment from you. Which activity seems interesting? Is anything unclear? Do you also blog about math circles? Scroll down to the end of the post and drop Shelley a line!

Book News: Socks Are Like Pants Layouts

Our latest book on early algebra, successfully crowdfunded this summer, is almost ready for printing and should be out in January! We are finishing last little details of the playful and bright layout. Click pictures for bigger versions, and try these activities with your children:

You can see more info about the book and pre-order it on the site.

Ways to Play with Math

Matific, a site with quick math apps with cute original art, had a blog post about advanced math for young children. A quote:

“Maria Droujkova, a curriculum developer and math education consultant, says the current model of mathematical education focuses on teaching simple ideas the hard way rather than teaching complex ideas the easy way.”

Much like Natural Math, the site advocates plenty of play in learning mathematics. How do you play with math? Here is a brief starter list: