We all have different life experiences. Some of us have had the opportunity to experience visiting or living in different states in America. One of the lessons in the Everyday Mathematics series asks for students to determine the states that they have visited or lived in America.
In order to visually represent the states that I have visited and lived, I created a digital color-coded map. Therefore I visited the following link. I simply had to consider all of the places I have traveled because I have only ever lived in Pennsylvania. Then I selected the color green to represent these states.
Example:
After marking all of the states, then I clicked "Create" which produced this map:
Visit this link and give it a try! You can choose any of the colors to represent the states where you have visited or lived.
This summer I learned how to complete Kakooma puzzles. This interesting activity has a deceptively simple concept, although it requires more thinking than you would expect. There are several different versions of Kakooma: addition, multiplication and negative numbers. These puzzles were created by Greg Tang, an author who has written books such as The Grapes of Math and Math Fables. He has also created many different activities to improve students' math skills.
In order to complete the addition version, the player looks at a set of numbers to find which number is the sum of two of other numbers. After choosing the correct answer for each mini games, the player needs to find the number that is the sum of two of the sums. The game is not complicated, but by the time a player finishes, many mental math calculations were needed.
Give this puzzle a try:
In order to sharpen your math skills, you can visit:
Kakooma for some free Kakooma trial games
Greg Tang's World of Math has some other fun games
Break Apart, Math Limbo and Numskill
This summer I have been thoroughly enjoying reading the Hunger Games series! Last spring I purchased the set of books from the Scholastic book order because many of my students as well as friends greatly recommended the series. I set two goals:
1. Read, read, read over the summer!
2. Complete the first book before seeing the movie
