Join Moebius Noodles Math Improv
We are inviting you to join Moebius Noodles Improv, a parent and educator online class, during the first three weeks of November.
In our very successful previous classes, we showed quite a few games for teaching advanced math concepts to young children in a relaxing and fun way that engages the entire family. This time around, we will teach you how to create your own games that fit your child’s unique interests and learning preferences. We will give you the confidence to improvise and create math games on the fly.
The class is a cooperative, peer-to-peer gathering of adventurous grown-ups who want to enjoy advanced math with babies, toddlers and young kids. Think of it more like a get-together at your favorite coffee shop than a “prim and proper” class.
Here is the plan for each of the three weeks:
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, you will get your improv prompt – a story or a video of a young math game, and ways you can vary it.
On Wednesdays and Fridays, you will improvise with your kids – we hope it will be a fun five or ten minutes for the whole family! You will send photos or videos of the improv to the class, and comment on others improvs.
Every photo, story, question, video you send will get a response from us, as well as other class members.
We will have live online jam sessions on the first Tuesday of the class (November 1st) and also a week after the class ends (November 22nd), for those whose schedules allow to attend at 9:30pm Eastern US time.
Why join?
- Learning: exchange smart game know-how with like-minded parents
- Reduction of doubts and fears: See how young math really happens in the families (worth a thousand books)
- Peer support: Have your math parenting questions answered by peers and veterans
- Make a difference: Each math improv story, video or photo you send, each question you pose contributes to a free and open (Community Commons) resource, for educating millions of kids (and their parents and teachers) all over the world
How to join?
Head to the Moebius Noodles Improv class page at P2PU (Peer-To-Peer University), click on “Participate” button and complete the sign-up task.
Posted in Make
Halloween Fractals
If your child is all about getting ready for Halloween, then this can be a terrific idea to introduce some beautiful math. I saw this idea on Almost Unschoolers and immediately bookmarked it!
The idea is to turn Apollonian and Sierpiensky fractals into fun arts projects. To start, you can learn more about these fractals and download the printouts from the Apollonian gasket wiki page and this page about Sierpinski triangle. And if you don’t have a printer readily available, you can just free-hand it (here’s Vi Hart’s video to get inspired by).
I showed Apollonian gasket to my 4-year old earlier today and told him that it’s a mathematical pumpkin patch (again, thanks to Almost Unschoolers for the inspiration). He’s really into Halloween decor, but it has to be scary, not cute. So I told him that if he colors the print, he can make it as scary as he wants it to be. It worked! My otherwise coloring-books-are-boring son could hardly wait for the pattern to be printed out.
Some of the questions that we discussed as he started working were:
- Do you want to color each circle the same color or a different color? (Different)
- How many different colors do you think you’ll need? (A million)
- Well, we don’t have that many different-colored crayons. What can we do? (Color big circles red, smaller ones green, smaller ones blue and tiny ones yellow)
- Why did you decide to stop coloring? (Because the circles are getting smaller and smaller and harder to color)
As you can see from the picture, he didn’t make it to the green crayon although he worked really-really hard on getting the red and blue ones just perfect. But he seemed quite content with the results and so was I.
I still have the Sierpinski printout saved for later and another Apollonian gasket for myself to doodle on.
Posted in Make
Is Your Child’s Playroom Math-Friendly?
I remember when back in the 5th grade my parents put a huge map of the world on the wall of my room. That was the year I read lots and lots of adventure stories and looked for all the places mentioned in them on my map. That was also the year when I breezed through all my geography tests and won a local geography bee.
It seems common sense now that you can encourage your child’s interests through room decor. With all the maps of the world and the Solar system and various posters of dinosaurs, buildings, rockets, human bodies, etc on the market it seems you can cover all the usual and not-so-usual interests your child might develop between now and college. Decorating for learning has never been easier, right?
Except, of course, if you’d like to promote math learning. Somehow posting giant multiplication tables above Junior’s bed doesn’t sound all that appealing. The problem is not that math posters don’t exist. In fact, a quick Google search will give you over 28 million links. It’s just most math posters seem to fall into one of the two categories – either math-y jokes or posters full of equations to be memorized. This is beyond boring! Sort of like pasting spelling bee words all over the walls. There’s just no excitement, sense of exploration or opportunity for story-telling in this.
So what’s a concerned parent to do? Here are a few solutions:
1. Fractals Posters
There are plenty available online, just search for “fractal posters” or images of fractals. Fractals are not simply beautiful. They are mesmerizing. They invite observation and exploration. They are also some of the simplest mathematical constructs. If your child can draw straight-ish lines, she can create simple fractals.
2. Rube Goldberg Machines and Marble Runs
These can be either posters or, better yet, real contraptions. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be particularly inventive or mechanically gifted to come up with one. As long as you can buy and assemble a game of Mouse Trap, you’re good to go. Marble runs of all sizes and configurations will work too and can be a wonderful DIY 3D art installation.
What your child learns in this case is the idea of functions and combination of functions. She learns to see regularity and predictability of input and output.
3. Mirrors
Mirrors are not just for dress-up. After all, mirrors teach important math concept of symmetry. However, a mirror on the wall is a bit limited in its educational possibilities. Instead, opt for smaller hand-held size mirrors. Tape a couple of them together to form a mirror book. You can use it as a prop in lots of various pretend games and as a background for all these imaginary landscapes children love to build. Along the way your child will observe symmetry, angles and might even discover multiplication.
4. Paint Chips
These are great for creating art that illustrates concepts of gradients. If you have paint chips with little square cut-outs in the middle, you can lay them over different color paint chips in a grid pattern illustrating the idea of combinations.
5. Paper solids
A while ago we wrote about making some not-so-basic geometric solids out of paper plates and paper cups. Even for someone like myself, who has two left thumbs, this is an easy project that comes out picture-perfect. So why not decorate your child’s room with the results?
I’ve just re-decorated my son’s room (which mostly consisted of repainting the walls and re-arranging the furniture). So now the room looks nice, if a bit bland. Writing this post makes me want to get to work decorating it right away! I’d love to hear your math-friendly decor ideas and take a look at your projects.
Posted in Make
Your Child Will Love This Math Game
Does your child have an interesting math book on her bookshelf? I don’t mean a cute book. And I don’t mean an interesting story that briefly mentions “math”. I’m talking about a book that both teaches math and talks about things of interest to your child.
What got me thinking about this question was “The Coolest Math Problem Ever” blog post on Geekmom.com. It’s a short post about a simple math problem that references a (still-popular?) X-Files show.
Good for you if your child is into X-Files. But what if she is more of a Trekker? Or maybe she’s too young for both and prefers the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse or Handy Manny instead?
For example, my not-quite-5-year old son can care less about pretty much the entire line-up of children’s shows and instead begs for Star Wars and anything “about robots”. His distant cousin, being slightly older and a girl, scoffs at everything unless it has horses in it. And a neighbor’s 2-year old is totally into his toy construction machines.
I bet, if you make math all about, say, robots, horses and trucks, it will be an epic win and your kid will most likely ask you for more math.
Except, it’s hard to find flashcards or workbooks that satisfy such diverse interests. So you have to be creative about it. Make your own and make it into a story because kids love stories.
I snapped the picture above a while ago at an art festival. And it looks totally awesome. But you don’t have to be remotely artistic to play this math story game. You can draw some pretty crude stick figures just as long as you explain to your child that “this is Mickey and this one is Goofy”. Or you can print the images off the Internet.
The point is you draw a grid, starting with smaller ones for younger or less experienced kids and progressing to larger ones. Draw (or glue) different parts of pictures in the top row and in the left column. For my Star Wars-obsessed boy, this was the game of “Jedis need pants too” in which characters wake up and try to get dressed only to discover that the evil Emperor mixed up all their pants.
Next, tell a story around it trying all the different combinations of the elements. Your child can help you to assemble the resulting combinations by drawing, gluing or just pointing. It might not happen first thing, but as the story progresses, she will become drawn into it more and more.
But hold on, is it really math? After all, there are no numbers here and no counting. You see, instead of counting, you are teaching your child to see and analyze combinations of two variables. Besides, these are not just any old combinations, but structured combinations meaning there’s some structure or pattern behind them (rows and columns of the grid).
Adults use this skill every day, from setting appointments (calendar is a grid) to figuring out bus schedules (grids) and Excel spreadsheets. Shooting higher, some of the hottest professions nowadays rely on visualization and data structuring skills.
Have you played the grid game with your child? We’d love to hear your story. Stumped by your child’s unusual interests? Share them with us and we’ll help you out.
Posted in Make
