Home Math Learning Boxes

I love this idea and wanted to share it. My good friend who is also a brilliant teacher, Patty Carpenter, shared this idea with me. Since she does not have a blog, I figured I should share it with the world so that others could see how smart it is.  Patty is a first grade teacher and each year, her students get a Math Learning Box for home. She includes all the things kids will need to play math games, etc. at home. She starts the box with a few tools and sends new additional tools home as they need them during the year.   We took the idea and changed it a bit for 3rd grade.  Last week, we sent home these boxes with students.  This is the beginning of it and we will add things as the year progresses.  Along with this box, we are sending home a folder of the 4 math games we have played so far.  We'll also add to the folder.

I've always struggled with math homework as I tend to think playing a math game gives kids more practice, is more fun, and starts great family conversations. But kids don't always have the supplies needed at all times. This box guarantees that the things kids need to play the math games and teach them to their families are always handy. And it seems like it will be a great piece of family communication as parents learn some of the games we play at school.

The kids are as excited about these boxes as I am. They helped put them together and couldn't wait to take them home. Parents have also been very positive about the idea of this type of homework.  And knowing that kids have these things at home, I imagine they'll do more math than they've done in the past.

It is a brilliant idea and the cost of putting it together was pretty minimal.  (I kept my eye out for things like dice and decks of cards at the dollar store and on amazon over the summer.)  As we learn new things, we'll add necessary supplies to the box--it will grow as the year goes on.

One side is a Hundred Chart. The other side is a Multiplication Chart.

3 regular dice and 2 ten-sided dice (0-9)

These go home with these items as well as a few sets of game cards that students have made and stored in Ziploc bags.

The 14 Fibs of Gregory K.

The 14 Fibs of Gregory K.
by Greg Pincus
Arthur A. Levine Books (on shelves September 24, 2013)

review ARC compliments of the publisher

There is so much to love about this book! 

First of all, the main character's favorite thing to do in his free time is...WRITE! Gregory K. and his friend Kelly get together after school to write, they trade notebooks and read each other's work, then write some more.

The second great thing about this book is Gregory's math teacher, Mr. Davis, a teacher worthy of a spot on our 100 Cool Teachers in Children's Literature list! When Gregory is in danger of failing math, Mr. Davis doesn't make him do more math, he plays to Gregory's strength and has him keep a math journal. Brilliant!

The third great thing is that there's lots of PIE in this book...along with the pi.

Here's the deal with Gregory and math -- he's the only person in his family who doesn't eat, sleep, breathe and live for math. And here's the deal with author Greg Pincus -- he tangles his character up in so many problems, the reader just about can't believe things will ever work out for him.

This is a fabulous debut novel!! More, Mr. Pincus, MORE!!

THAT'S A POSSIBILITY by BRUCE GOLDSTONE

Bruce Goldstone is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.  I was thrilled during a recent visit to Cover to Cover when Beth shared his most recent book with me, That's a Possibility!: A Book About What Might Happen.   I love books that support concept development and understanding of difficult vocabulary. This book is a great picture book that does both things well!

Bruce Goldstone takes the idea of probability and explains it over and over in ways that kids can understand-flipping a coin, rolling dice, getting a certain prize out of a gumball machine. Using white background and amazing photographs, each page is an engaging visual with so much to think about.  And he embeds the confusing words that go along with probability and possibility throughout the book: possibility, probability, certain, impossible, possible, likely, odds, etc.

I'm thinking about using this somehow at the beginning of the year as part of some kind of interactive all display but I'm not sure--it certainly invites conversation and thinking.  I am sure this book will be read again and again by my students this year.

MATH EXCHANGES: GUIDING YOUNG MATHEMATICIANS IN SMALL-GROUP MEETINGS

I also read Math Exchanges: Guiding Young Mathematicians in Small Group Meetings by Kassia Omohundro Wedekind and published by Stenhouse.  I'm not getting as much professional reading in as I had hoped but I am really committed to reading the math stuff on my list. NUMBER TALKS was an amazing read earlier this summer and I took MATH EXCHANGES with me on my flights this week.  I had read bits and pieces of this one when it was released and I had the chance to talk to Kassia for a Choice Literacy podcast. But this time, I read it cover to cover, knowing that I will be teaching math this year.  It is a funny thing--people know me as a literacy teacher but I am really a math person--math is far easier for me as a "subject". I think in numbers and logic.  I love problem solving  And I love to teach math. One of the reasons I love a self-contained classroom is because of the conversations that are similar across subject areas. I've been lucky in my career to teach with a few brilliant math teachers who taught me early on how to make math meaningful for kids.  So, I am excited to get back to math teaching and excited to read the newest thinking out there as I plan my year with a new group of 4th graders.

MATH EXCHANGES is written about young children. The examples are from K-3 classrooms and the focus is really on very young (K-1) children.  But the implications for all teachers is huge.  Kassia's understanding of not only mathematics, but of how children develop, how she looks at student work, the strategic ways in which she builds problems and scaffolds for children, taught me a great deal.

One thing I love about Kassia's message is her message of "joyful rigor". She says, "Community, rigor, and joy are at the heart of the workshop approach to teaching and learning."  She connects much of her workshop to what she has learned from Peter Johnston in Choice Words as she talks about the importance of identity and agency in mathematics.

Kassia is honest in admitting that math workshop is hard work. She says, "Math workshop is not the easiest path to take. We have plenty of outside resources willing to tell us exactly what, when and how to teach our students. And yet, none of these resources has the intimate knowledge of our community of mathematicians that you have.  Math workshop communities create empowered learners-both students and teachers-who question, wonder, explore and make conjectures.  Rigorous joy in math is within the realm of the possible-it is, in fact, what makes math workshop worth it!"

Kassia shares her knowledge about math, types of problems, intentional planning and how she learns about a child's understanding. Kassia includes story after story to help us see what this looks and sounds like in a real classroom. The student samples help us begin to see the ways that she learns from student work.  And she includes tools and forms that will help us as we try to implement some of her ideas.

Some of my favorite lines from this book include:

We will work to become experts on the development of each of our young mathematicians.


Regardless of the math program or curriculum you are using, working to understand each individual child's math development and how to responsively guide children to deeper understanding through small-group work remains the strongest way in which we, as teachers, can promote a strong mathematical foundation for our learners. p. 22


Math exchanges emphasize change. This may sound simple, but the purpose of meeting with small groups of mathematicians is to produce change and growth in their thinking....Math exchanges put the focus on planned, purposeful exchanges between mathematicians of different abilities. . 33


In Teaching Essentials, Regie Routman writes about "teaching with a sense of urgency". Before reading her words, I had always associated urgency with a feeling of anxiety. However, after reading and thinking further I found that "the expectation that there is not a minute to lose, that every moment must be used for purposeful instruction" rings true not just within the context of teaching literacy, which Routman writes about, but throughout the entire day as teachers. p. 36


Purposeful and effective planning does not begin by focusing on what a student does not know. p.63


Problem solving, with carefully chosen problem types and numbers, is one of the best ways to help children build strong understandings of the number system. p. 137


I strive to achieve balance between two kinds of reflections during math workshop: content reflection....and process reflection.  Content reflection focuses on a specific math concept or strategy that you and your class have been discussing and working on...Process reflection on the other hand, focuses on developing practices and behaviors of strong mathematicians.  p. 177


I cannot possibly include all that I loved about this book. I cannot possibly share all that I learned or all that I came away thinking with. What I do know is that this book will impact my teaching of math to better match what I believe about students and learning.

(If you are interested in hearing more from Kassia about math teaching, you can access her Choice Literacy podcast here.)

Area, Perimeter, Volume -- a math poem

AREA, PERIMETER, VOLUME

Gardens and fences
and new tile floors,
towers of blocks
and a bulletin board border.

Perimeter says "RIM"
and area is flat,
volume takes space...
I know all of that,

but keeping them straight
in my head is a problem:
square? cubic? units?
perimeter? area? volume?

Some day I'll grow up
and need carpet and tile,
frame art and fill boxes...
THEN this will be worthwhile!

© Mary Lee Hahn, 2012




Poem #25, National Poetry Month, 2012


Area and perimeter are SO hard for fourth graders to keep straight!




Cathy, at Merely Day By Day, is joining me in a poem a day this month. Other daily poem writers include Amy at The Poem Farm, Linda at TeacherDance, Donna at Mainely Write, Laura at Writing the World for Kids (daily haiku), Liz at Liz in Ink (daily haiku), Sara at Read Write Believe (daily haiku), Jone at Deo Writer (daily haiku)...and YOU?

Zero the Hero

Zero the Hero
by Joan Holub
illustrated by TomLichtenheld
Henry Holt, 2012
review copy provided by the publisher

My students and I loveloveLOVED E-Mergency by Tom Lichtenheld and Ezra Fields-Meyer!!

When I put the poster for Zero the Hero on the chalkboard, excitement was instantaneous.

E-Mergency was a funny look at the way the letters of the alphabet work together (and how our words suffer when the E cannot be used). In Zero the Hero, ("A Book About Nothing"), Zero has all the trappings of a hero -- mask, cape, and pointy boots -- but he doesn't seem to be able to do anything amazing (mathematically speaking) all by himself.

"The thought gave Zero a hollow feeling inside." So he runs rolls away. Without Zero, the other numbers realize they are severely limited. Then, when the Roman Numerals capture the Counting Numbers...well, Zero can finally be a true hero.

JUST A SECOND: A DIFFERENT WAY TO LOOK AT TIME by Steve Jenkins

Just a Second: A Different Way to Look at Time
by Steve Jenkins
Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2011
review copy provided by the publisher

For the first few pages of this book, I felt REALLY slow. Steve Jenkins begins his book about time with a paragraph of information about the interval of time known as a second (an interval not related to any cycle in nature -- a human invention) and then pictures of animals or objects with a caption that tells how many of something they accomplish in a second. 20 hammers on a tree trunk for a woodpecker, 300 meters of a stoop (dive) for a peregrine falcon, Earth advances 18.5 miles in its orbit around the sun, a commercial jet covers 800 feet.

At the beginning of the pages about the minute, we learn that it, too, is a human invention, based on a Babylonian counting system. The hour we use, the one that divides day and night into twelve parts each, comes from the Egyptians. Days, weeks and months each get their own spreads of facts. They are based on cycles in nature.

Jenkins ends the book with a spread of "Very Quick" things -- things that happen in fractions of a second, like the trip a major league fastball makes to the plate (4/10 of a second), and a spread of "Very Long" things (in 2,000,000,000 years, the Earth's oceans will have boiled away).

Also in the ending are several graphics that I'd love to have as posters or handouts so that my students could look and  think and wonder and discuss the information presented graphically (no explanation or descriptive text): the history of the universe shown in a Fibonacci spiral, the Earth's human population in a stacked bar graph that shows the growth every 50 years by continent, a chart of life spans of a selection of plants and animals, and a timeline of this history of time and timekeeping.

You Can Count on Monsters

You Can Count on Monsters
by Richard Evan Schwartz
published by A.K. Peters, 2010
review copy provided by the publisher

I love teaching math, so excuse me for getting excited about a book that has fun with prime and composite numbers, and prime factorization!

Mathematician Richard Evans Schwartz has created a monster for each of the numbers from 1-100. The prime number monsters are what make up the composite number monsters, in the same way that each composite number is made by multiplying prime factors. The monster for the prime number 2 has two blue and pink google eyes. The monster for the prime number 3 is a red triangle with a big yellow smile. The monster for the prime number 5 is a bright gold star with green google eyes. The monster for the composite number 30 is made of the prime numbers 2, 3, and 5 because those are the prime factors of 30 -- 2x3=6 and 6x5=30, so 2x3x5=30. In the 30 monster you can find the bright gold star, a blue google eye and a big red triangle.

This will be a great book to preview with kids to show them how it works, and then turn them loose with it to see what they can find.

Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin talked to NPR's Weekend Edition host Scott Simon about You Can Count on Numbers. (Listen here.) He says that mathematicians are different from regular folk because to them, numbers have personality, structures and relationships. The brilliance of Schwartz's book is that he makes those ways of thinking and seeing come to life for anyone who studies the pages of YOU CAN COUNT ON MONSTERS!

At Richard Evans Schwartz's website, you can see what some of the monsters look like.

Go look! What do YOU notice?

New Math Literature

2 years ago, I purchased the book GREAT ESTIMATIONS and LOVED IT! The kids in my 3rd/4th grade class LOVED it! It had the feel of an "I Spy" Book but had so much to teach us about math. I know that books often help kids make sense of math concepts and this is one that can help all of us think differently about estimating. So, yesterday, I was thrilled when Beth at Cover to Cover showed me GREATER ESTIMATIONS-- a second book about estimating!

Bruce Goldstone (who I was happy to learn grew up in Ohio!) is quite the genius. You don't realize it at first, but these books are teaching books. Goldstone takes us through the process of learning to make good estimates. But you are so busy having such fun looking at the amazing photos and trying to make a good estimate, that it almost takes many reads to pick up all of the great things that you can do to make better estimates.

Bruce Goldstone chooses some pretty cool things to photograph and for us to estimate. He chooses a variety because he teaches us the different ways to estimate--clump counting, estimating length, etc. Readers spend time looking at rubber ducks, honeybees, skydivers, dominoes, hairs on a cat, and blades of grass.

Lots of interesting facts as well as humorous talking bubbles fill the pages. The author also includes a note at the end of the book. He talks about the fun of estimating, but also about how helpful it is in everyday life. He shares times when estimation is critical that I hadn't really thought about.

I had just assumed that Goldstone used computers to create these images but, from his author blurb in the back of the books that Beth pointed out to me, it seems that he spends hours and hours setting real things up for photographing! Very cool.

Goldstone has a fun website that includes info about him, his books and more. It also includes a fun game called "Estimatron" that allows you to practice those estimation skills!  If you like the ducks in the book, you'll be happy to see them again (and again) on the site!