Summer Math Practice

The last post was about summer reading practice, so it only makes sense to follow up with summer math practice! Parents often ask me how they can practice basic skills with their children over the summer. Begone, worksheets and workbooks! Look online for some of the best math practice and manipulatives to help you work on your math skills:

• Arcademic Skill Builders: Mostly math games for elementary kids
• Fun 4 the Brain: games for multiplication, addition, subtraction, and division
• ABCya!: Addition Games
• Ghost Blasters: Practice your multiples
• Mavin's Math Mysteries: Solve math mysteries
• Kids and Cookies: Practice division and fractions
• Base 10 Block Game: Fun!
• Primary Games: Math practice, as well as other subject areas
• Math Playground: manipulatives and games
• City Planner: Practice with fractions
• Division with 2 Digit Divisors: great for modeling to children
• Division with remainders: related to the site above, but with remainders
• Interactive Clock: Best practice for helping your child tell time
  

Teacher Led: White Board Activities!

I just came across a website called Teacher Led and it's one of the best sites I have seen to use with interactive whiteboards in a long time! One of their pages is a list of interactive activities that were designed to practice basic concepts on the interactive whiteboard. At this time, most of the activities are designed for math, but there are a few for reading and social studies. "I don't have an interactive whiteboard!" you might complain. These activities would work well on eInstruction chalkboards or Promethean ActivSlates as well. Don't have those either? If you have a computer connected to a projector in your classroom, these activities can be just as effective. Let's take a look at some of these:




The first one is an activity where you have to find common multiples using a Venn Diagram. When you have sorted all of the numbers, you can start over with a fresh batch of numbers to practice with.



The second one allows you to explore the concept of symmetry. Use shapes or draw and color with the pen tools to make a design. The activity will automatically fill in the other 3 quadrants as you draw. This makes a difficult concept very easy to illustrate.




The third one demonstrates the concept of prime factorization. You have the option of choosing a number, and the simulation will break the number down into its factors. Remove the "leaves" over each number to see if you were correct in your guess.


These are just three examples of many activities that Teacher Led has to offer. I highly recommend this site to classroom teachers looking for ways to illustrate difficult concepts.


Related Posts:

Interactive Whiteboard Links
Games for the Interactive Whiteboard
Kids and Cookies
Division Online

Kidspiration 3: New Features

Kidspiration 3, the primary version of Inspiration, will be coming to FCPS as of this fall! Let me sum up some of the new features that will make a good program GREAT!

• Improved Record Option (so that you an record your voice longer on every textbox, and not just one per page)
• Easier to add text boxes
• Improved Teacher Control: on the teacher enabled menu, teachers can lock items into place so that they are not accidentally moved and placed on top of other items.
• Expanded symbol library of clip art
• Symbol search: now you can search for clip art by keyword like in Inspiration
• Word Guide: Look up word for definitions, synonyms, antonyms
• 5 New Math Tool Views!! (This is my favorite part): Color tiles, base 10 blocks, pattern blocks, fraction tiles, fraction boxes
• Math Text boxes: write fractions, division, and vertical math notations
• Step Work Space: allows teachers and students to show steps of a math problem in an easy to ready format
• Cross-out stamp: allows you to "cross out" items when showing subtraction, division, or regrouping
• Multiple Page feature: Now you can click through pages easily with up and down arrows, which allow you to open multiple documents in one window at a time
• More curriculum content, lesson plans, and teacher tools

The best improvement by far is the addition of the math tools. You can easily model equivalent fractions, or multi-step addition and subtraction with regrouping. The base 10 blocks can be color coded to show the top and bottom number of an addition problem. Use the "group" tool to group 10 ones together to make a rod. Use the "break apart" tool to separate rods into ones and flats into rods. No need to use physical manipulatives when you are teaching! Think of how easy it would be to clean this up after math!

I summarized some of these features from Peggy Wood, a Technology Resource Specialist from Cecil County, that I saw speak at MICCA this week. She has resources on her page. Thanks, Peggy, for one of the best sessions that I attended at MICCA!

RELATED POSTS:
Mandala Maker Perfect for Math Concepts
Division: Visual Representations Online
Online Math Manipulatives and Activities
Math Help Step-by-Step
Kids and Cookies
Base 10 Block Games

“Kids and Cookies”: Easy Division Site for Kids

Check out this cool “Kids and Cookies” site!

Students are presented with a problem: they have friends coming over and cookies to share. You can choose how many friends you have and how many cookies you want to share among all of them. If your cookies don’t divide out equally, you can put the cookie on the cutting board and chop it into fractions to share equally among your friends. The best part is there are printable “friends” and “cookies” that go along with the site so that kids can follow along at their desks. Kids and Cookies would be a great supplemental resource to use with the book The Doorbell Rang.

Try using Kids and Cookies with your Interactive White Board as well!

RELATED POSTS:
Mandala Maker Perfect for Math Concepts
Division: Visual Representations Online
Online Math Manipulatives and Activities
Math Help Step-by-Step
Interactive Whiteboard Links
Games for the Interactive Whiteboard

Division: visual respresentations online

Teachers, what do you do when you are teaching division and your students just don’t get it? Just like we learned in college, you go back to manipulatives. Once children understand concrete examples, they can start moving to abstract problems. Until they get to that point, any visual examples you can provide the child will help. For example, the online E-Lab through Harcourt School Publishers is a wonderful opportunity for children to “see” division problems. The first site illustrates division with two digit divisors. (See picture below.)

The second site by E-Lab allows children to practice division with remainders depending in the problem you type in. (See picture below.) Very few sites give children a visual representation of how division works, so these sites are valuable resources to teachers. Happy dividing!

Online Math Manipulatives and Activities

Check out the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives! Right now this is a free site, and I’m not sure it will stay that way because the site is already advertising their activities on CD. However, for now teachers can use this site in math class for free. The site offers a variety of online math manipulatives for K-12 ranging from Base Ten Blocks, to geoboards, and spinners. Now you can use these items without the mess! Virtual clean-up! I used the geoboards in my class and laughed - the children were still expecting the rubber bands to snap off the screen and hit them.

Another one of my favorite sites is the interactive online clock. Project this website in class to help your class tell time on an analog clock. Using the red and green buttons at the bottom of the screen will allow you to create different times on the clock. Notice that the sun and moon will rise and set in the background as you change the time, which helps the children distinguish between AM and PM. If you use an interactive whiteboard, this site is even better since students can come to the board and use the buttons to change the time in class. Use the button on the right side, you can also display the time in a digital clock, so the students can compare the clocks side by side. Since you can hide the digital clock, it’s great for quizzing the kids on the analog clock since they can check their work on the digital clock.

A few other sites worth checking out for math instruction:

1. Online graphing calculator
2. Interactive Math Games (such as Arithmetic Four)
3. Create a graph
4. More virtual manipulatives