Math Teachers At Play - Sep 4, 2009 edition

Welcome to another edition of "Math Teachers At Play"! It is again a very engaging and interesting assortment of posts, so feel free to stay a while and relax. Thank you for everyone who submitted!

We'll start out in the early years of kindergarten. What happens when a research mathematician goes into a kindergarten class? Something interesting, creative ... and best of all, kids love it. Go check Sequences and Creative Math for Kindergartners.

Next in line, kids in the elementary school (grades 1-4) spend a lot of time with math facts. Consider the fun Joey-Joey math game to help them practice!

We advance to 5th grade. With "Math Buddy" you can explore Fractions as part of life.

"Discrete Ideas" presents The Shortest Path - or mental math multiplication shortcuts for all of us. As a tie-in, I provide a PROOF for one of those shortcuts, which could be used as an exercise in algebra class.

Next, we advance to middle school. Quadrilateral Property Combo Chart shows how the Number Warrior finally untangled the dilemma of explaining the relationships between the quadrilaterals.

Tom from "I Want to Teach Forever" offers us an Erasing Debt Activity with a printable activity sheet. This is based on real-life data (actually offers he's received in the mail), and can get students really engaged in comparing the various options for paying back a debt. For middle school on up.

And lastly, time for miscellaneous math teaching articles.

What is the shape of the Earth? Do you think it's a sphere (a ball)? John Cook from "The Endeavour" answers the question. He also submitted Three algorithms for converting color to grayscale. It actually sounds pretty simple!

Well, now we get off math for a bit. An urban, high school mathematics teacher rambles on about something annoying... but gives us a glimpse to the issues teachers face.
From "Math and Logic Play" we get The Woman, Dog, and Flea riddle.
A complex-sounding question has a surprisingly simple answer.

We end the carnival with something fun. Here's something that most of us have probably not tried... using SKITS to teach math! From "I Want to Teach Forever"...

Thanks for reading - I hope you enjoyed something! Here's where you can submit to the next carnival.