Archives

• April 2004 - "Good Questions That Get Good Answers" - Students love to talk. They talk between classes; they talk during class. The trick is to get them to talk about class. Nowhere is this more difficult than during math.
• March 2004 - "Polygon Patterns," teaches students how to recognize visual and numeric patterns, in addition to other skills.
• February 2004 - "X Marks the Spot," a fun activity to help students practice the basic skills of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing that works equally well with whole numbers, fractions, decimals, and integers.
• January 2004 - With "Paper Plate Graphs," students will be able to quickly create accurate pie charts that can be used for critical thinking activities.
• December 2003 - "Guessing the Gifts" presents a very simple way to introduce a very advanced algebraic concept: simultaneous equations.
• November 2003 - More and more we hear that teachers are finding the connection between language and mathematics.  This month we offer a trio of engaging problems from our NEWEST book, "The Language of Math: Helping Students Speak, Write, and Think Mathematically."
• October 2003 - Teachers are always looking for new strategies for teaching fraction concepts to students. This month we offer a clever way to help students remember all the steps that are involved in adding and subtracting fractions with unlike denominators.
• September 2003 - What gives students more trouble than fractions?  This month's activity helps students make crucial connections between the three representations of fractions: common fractions, decimals fractions, and percents.
• August 2003 - As students begin their annual migration from swimming pools and summer camp back to their classrooms, we teachers are looking for creative and powerful activities to welcome them back.  Often the students are so consumed in this great getting-to-know you activity they forget they are doing math! 
• July 2003 - Math is all around us even during summer vacation. Your students will be surprised to learn they can determine the temperature with a good level of accuracy by counting the cricket's chirps.
• June 2003 - Students learn how to calculate the area of a map of the United States and use a conversion scale to find the actual area of our country.
• May 2003 - Our ratio and proportions lesson continues with an activity called "Lemons and Grapefruit."
• April 2003 - For April, we offer the first of a two-part series on ratio and proportion. This month's newsletter contains six strategies for solving proportions. In addition, we offer your students a great tool for making sense of word problems that involve proportions and percents.
• March 2003 - This month's free activity, "Pyramid Math," is designed to build number sense in your students -- a critical need not often addressed by textbook programs. At the same time, the activity provides skills practice and can be adapted to any grade level from primary to algebra.
• February 2003 - This month's free activity, "Milk Carton Apartments," is a simple and powerful activity that uses easy-to-find materials to help students explore both number sense and algebra. In addition to a great activity this month, we even offer an "udderly" silly quiz.
• January 2003 - January's free activity, "Fraction Number Line," is from our newest book, Simply Great Math Activities: Fractions, Decimals and Percents. Also, beginning this month are two new features: Mathematics Book of the Month and Mathematics Web Site of the month
• December 2002 - "Snowflake Geometry" is December's free activity, exploring reflections and symmetry. The lesson ties in well to art, for those wanting to connect to other curricular areas.
• November 2002 - This month's free activity, "Four-in-a-Row," helps students learn their multiplication tables and can be adapted to practice multiplication of two-digit numbers, fractions, decimals, or integers.