Have you ever dived into a river, lake, ocean, or pool? Have you ever done it in the dark or with your eyes closed? Much scarier, isn’t it? The prospect of leading a math circle, even a small one – your children and a couple of their friends, can be just as scary. While many people understand […]
These are notes from a Math Circle for children ages 4-5 and their parents. The goal of the first meeting on October 11 was to introduce cycles, iterations, and infinity. We had about a dozen quick activities, half of them from the book Moebius Noodles: Adventurous Math for the Playground Crowd, and the rest newly […]
This week, we tackled the idea that infinitely many things don’t have to add up to infinitely large space. The idea is deep, but young children don’t have the mental resistance to it yet. But they do feel the sense of wonder! In general, you want to introduce ideas early enough that they don’t cause […]
Want to write about playful math for the next carnival? See a blog post you like? Submit your links at Math Teachers at Play! Deep math Evens and odds at f(t) Kate usually works with older kids. Following comments from elementary school teachers, she became “a little obsessed” designing a lesson about proofs for young […]
