Kid Conversation

I was cleaning out my bookshelf yesterday and found this written in an abandoned spiral notepad intended for writing my "personal history" (that I clearly never did....)  But here was my first entry from October 15, 2013.  (The Frog was just barely 5)

I love having kids that can now narrate their thoughts.  They often have the most interesting perspective.

I can't remember now what exactly was going on, but I think I was probably quizzing Jack on some simple addition.  He still used his fingers to solve these problems and had miscounted.  I probably indicated in some vague way, that he should maybe count again.  He was dead certain of his answer and so I showed him with my fingers the correct answer.  His reply was a moan, "Why are you always right?  I can't wait until I'm 6 and I know everything!"

Math Game for Kids: Number Boxing

Now that Halloween's over (except, it's not for us, because we had a huge storm the night before and half our area was without power so it's been postponed until Friday, but anyway...) if you find your kids having too much candy, you might challenge them to boxing.  How it works:

You say a number, and see if they can make a filled in rectangle with that number of candies. (It works best if they're all the same size- like m&ms)

Can you make more than one box?

That's it.

Don't tell them their secretly learning about factoring and prime numbers-

If it can't be boxed, i.e. it can only be arranged in a line, it's prime.

If it can be boxed, the dimensions multiplied together will give you the number.  Some numbers have more than one box! (ex. 24 = 2x12, 3x8, 4x6)

If it's dimensions are equal, it is a square number!

I <3 pi

I love math and I love to bake and I love to eat baked goods, so Pi day is definitely my favorite fake holiday :)

In case you've been living under a rock and don't know why this is the best Pi day you will ever experience...

pi or π, is just a ratio.  Take any circle or cylinder - your favorite can of soup? and measure around the circumference.  Write that down. Now, measure across the circle - the diameter.  Write that down.  Now get out a calculator, if you're math averse or paper and pencil if math is your super-power.  Take the first number and divide by the second and you should get π.

π = 3.14159265359.....

Something else magical?  It goes on forever and never repeats.

So, today is special because the date is 3/14.  (3.14  get it?)

But hold the phone because we get a March 14th every year...  This year is the best one in the lifetime of pretty much everyone you know because the date is 3/14/15. (so do something awesome at 9:27)  Cool right?

I admit it- I'm completely jealous of all those people who go to be at the truest pi day ever - 3/14/1592 at 6:54 AM.

Anyway, this year, I have decided to start a new twist on the tradition in which we not only eat pie on pi day, but we break our family rule of "no treats before lunch" and have pie for breakfast to forever commemorate our experiencing this pi day of our lives.

What can I say, math brings out my rebellious side :)

Homeschooling- earliest math and money

So, Jay really, really, really wants to homeschool our kids, because he wishes he could have been homeschooled.  I admit, I can see how much better one-on-one attention would be, how much time must wasted by busy-work when one teacher must teach 30 kids at different levels, how public schools must be run for efficiency, not necessarily for maximal learning, etc. etc.  BUT, I still have some reservations about some of the social things, worries about parent/child clash, and wonderings if I could even pull it off better than people who have been doing it for 30 years.  'Cause anyone who knows me knows that I **heart** school.  Seriously!  If I had my way, I would just live on a college campus and take classes the rest of my life.  I just love to learn!  BUT, looking back, I could have probably learned a lot more had I been given one-on-one (or even one-on-3) attention.  However, I am to this day, a pretty awkward person, and without school, I would not know my 2 dearest friends from HS (Hi Linds! Hi Mel!) who know me in a way nobody else ever could, because they were with me through thick and thin since, yes, 7TH GRADE.  And to me, that is invaluable.

BUT, perhaps if I were homeschooled, I would have had more time for social endeavors, and would have tried to make them count more.  Once I hit 7th grade, I did have to pare down on my extracurriculars due to time constraints.  I was sad to let the Salt Lake Children's Choir go.  It would have been fun to keep up on basketball.  I was sad to stop soccer after the next year.  And I could have sought out other unique activities that I just plain didn't have time for with everything else...

So, ANYWAY, I'm willing to give it a shot.  For now, we are happy to have our kids attend BYU preschool and kindergarten- two affordable and excellent programs that do give the kids individual attention with a student:teacher ratio of 4:1.  Meanwhile, Jay and I want to set-up shop and start a routine so we can lay a foundation for later when it really matters more.

I've been really interested in alternative methods for learning math and I've been intrigued by these Cuisenaire Rods.  You can read more about them here.  I really stumbled upon them on amazon.com when I was looking for some game pieces to use to make a sort of Sequence game for learning letters.  And then I saw these Interlocking Centimeter Cubes and I thought they could probably work for both!

So, I got them and I had no idea how excited the kids (especially The Frog) would be about playing with them.

We've made faces and flowers and even little scenes with them.  But they've also worked great as homemade cuisenaire rods.  (They aren't in the "official" color order here, because I thought rainbow order would be easier to remember.  BUT, I could easily change that :D)

I thought it would be a good idea to get some kind of book to guide me with them at first, and decided upon this one: Miquon Math, Level 1.  Some of the reviews said they thought Lab Sheet Annotations and Mathematics for the Primary Teacher and First-Grade Diary were essential companions, but I'm planning to just check out the first book before I commit.  (Also, since math is kinda my "thing" maybe I won't need answers, explanations, etc?)  I got it, and yes, it has no instruction whatsoever, but I think I get the gyst.

do you recognize this scene?

I actually haven't used them much with The Frog yet because I want to finish up what we've started already (just some addition flash cards we have, using fingers or drawn dots to figure them out) and also because he's been doing subtraction that results in negative numbers already too, and I haven't figured out a great way of doing that with the rods yet.  BUT, I whipped it out with Peach and she had fun doing the first couple of pages (which was just counting) and was especially excited to use "the pink ones".  (an added benefit of using these blocks instead of the rods)

using our rods to show coin values

I think I had my first big win, though, when I used them to talk about money with The Frog.  I've tried to explain coin values to him before, but I just don't have enough pennies lying around to get the point across, and it's also tedious and hard to move them around fast enough when they're all separate.  I think doing this really helped him understand and he keeps asking if we can learn about money again.  Yay!!  I'll report again later when I've experimented a bit more.

I've thought about starting a separate homeschooling blog where I can keep track of what we did, what went well, what didn't, so I'll have a good place to reference for the "next round".

Any clever title ideas?

10000 days

Today is my 10,000th day of life. Want to find out when yours is? Go here. Use the second box :)

To celebrate, I made Creme Brulee.

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

Who's the purest one of all?

Yeah, that's right.

Mmmmm pi...

Happy pi day!

I wish I had something fun to write about, but I'm in the thick of having a cold, finals and packing for the move next week so I really don't. I just thought I should recognize one of the mathiest days of the year :) It's now just about 1:59pm, which would be a super cool time to post this, but I just gotta go study, so I'm putting it up 15 minutes early.

In the mean time, here's a little pi video that I don't really know what to make of...

Happy Day Plus

For some reason, I haven't felt much inspiration for blogging lately. Perhaps it's because I've been spending all my alloted "blog-minutes" on reading other, more interesting blogs. Then, by the time I've caught up with everything in my Google-reader and feel like I have all kinds of comments, the guilt and panic for having just spent X minutes/hours on anything but homework starts to set in. Promptly, I shove my face in my fluid mechanics, or begin googling the numerical approximation we apparently learned about in last lecture, but now that I am supposed to implement it, I realize I actually have no clue what to do.

Nevertheless, I thought that today, being such an important day, one that we experience only once every four years (except at the turn of the century, unless it's the turn of a milennium), I should point out that I am still alive enough to recognize its significance and relish in my 7th leap day ever. That's a pretty significant achievement, if I do say so myself.

Something really interesting to think about **WARNING: this paragraph may involve some math** is how many times I will re-experience a leap day on the same day of the week as a previous leap day. So far, it hasn't happened yet. The leap days of my life (and yes, I figured it out the old-fashioned way: looking it up in Google calendar) have been on (in chronological order, starting in 1984) W, M, Sat, Th, T, Sun, and now Friday. It's interesting that it does actually hit every single day, which makes sense if you notice that it skips 5 days every time (Monday is the 5th day after Wednesday, etc) and there are 7 days in a week. (Note: it skips to the 5th day because there are 365x4=1460 days in between leap days, and you might just happen to notice that 1460 = 4 mod 7.) For all you group theory people out there, you know that a cyclical group can be generated by powers of groups relatively prime to it. So we see, since 5 and 7 are prime, they are obviously relatively prime as well, thus skipping 5 days will eventually hit all 7 days. (This turns out to be a great example of it)

Pretty dang awesome.

I do have one question, though. Why is it called "leap day"? To me, that makes it sound like we're skipping a day, but really we get an extra one. I think we should call it "bonus day", or "extended year", or in honor of Jay's vernacular: "day plus".

And now for a random leaping dude, in honor of this leap day:


Hope you get to make the most of your extra day :)

Math Marketing

Stuff like this really makes my blood boil! Our math education has enough problems as it is... we don't need people to go around screwing it up even more! I find a very good summary of the innate evil of this idea here.

Ever since learning about modular arithmetic, I cursed my elementary school teachers for not teaching me about it as soon as I understood clocks and division, so that it could be more intuitive for me as a college student. Is modular arithmetic generally useful? For most people, no. Is it any harder to learn about than fractions? No. Can it lead to talking about more interesting, fun things to do with math? Yes. Could it be a good head start to those who choose to learn about real math? Yes.

And what about prime numbers? There is sooo much that can be gained from spending more time on prime numbers and prime factorizations. Once you know have that, combine it with modular arithmetic and you're all ready for some basic number and group theory...

I think one of the biggest problems is that soooo many people just get it ingrained into their heads that math is boring or not fun before they even start, based on how adults around them talk about it. I firmly believe that if we could end all nay-speaking of math, more people would enjoy it and actually excel! Unfortunately, that will never happen, so I've come to accept the idea of proving to brainwashed kids that math can be, no, is fun and exciting and creative. I know there are many fun math activities that people have done to get kids excited about math, and it worked!!

I'm trying to build a repertoire of such activities. So please all, rack your brains for all those fun math things you did growing up and share them here :) Think macaroni and cheese colored blocks, think abacus, think making shapes out of paper, think clever math puzzles. What did you enjoy about math?