Homeschool Math Blog

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 Prope...

I got word that folks at Blogged.com had rated a bunch of math blogs, and placed mine in the top ten, with rating 8.6 (out of 10). They evaluate blogs based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style. So here is a list of mathematics blogs , rated in a scale 0-10. The list does resemble the blogrolls that I've seen on other math blogs... If you're a math blogger, go find yours!

Welcome to 2008! Carnival of homeschooling, the 2-year anniversary edition is up at Why Homeschool. Henry notes that during 2007, over 300 bloggers contributed to the carnival. That is quite a bunch! I'm glad, for the hosts' sakes, that not all of them contribute any one time! Also, they are hosting a contest for the Carnival of Homeschooling graphic . Also, Sol at Wild About Math has invited math bloggers to find their most popular posts during 2007. Well, I'm kind of a latecomer on this because he wanted the comments before the end of 2007, but I thought maybe you'd enjoy knowing anyway. Now, I used to have but a measly SiteMeter free version installed, so I frankly don't know which posts were visited the most. (I did install Google Analytics yesterday, instead, so from now on I will know!) Based on the number of comments, these were among the most popular: Multiplying in parts and the standard algorithm So many percent more Performing well below grade level The...

I was surprised to find that Denise had included me in her Math Bloggers Hall of Fame . Thanks! I feel honored to be a part... On her list, I found some new reading material from the other blogs listed. Found some interesting posts right off the bat: Snowflake math - this is a neat lesson plan. Makes kids thing spatially. Teaching: The Really Big Number (applied) . This is a lesson plan about the problem where you need to find the remainder of 100 100 . Both of these are obviously from good teachers. Enjoy.

Just some interesting posts from other blogs: How to read a fraction from Let's Play math. Denise explains how a fraction is not two numbers, a fraction's "first name" and "family name", the line in it meaning division, and more. Good Math, Bad Math gives an example of the latter: How the lottery company's game "Cool Cash" had to be canceled in Britain . I had hard time believing this one as well! And some solid tips of How to get past “stupid” Math mistakes from Wild About Math!

You might not have heard about it, but there exists a blog carnival for math, too. I submitted my rainbow entry into the latest one. Not all of the entries there are higher math, by the way, such as MathMom's Calculator rant or Puzzler puzzled from JD2718. If interested, go check it out: Carnival of math, edition 17 !

I upgraded the blog template to the new one that Blogger provides, and then added the searchable "labels" in the side bar. So now you can click on any of those "labels" (down on the right side), and find my past posts on that topic. I've written nearly 300 posts since I started the blog (in late 2005). Of course not all of those posts are of mathematical topics, but there is still quite a bit of material that is still as good as ever. Hope this new feature improves the functionality of this blog. Enjoy reading!

I've been blogging for over a year now. It's been fun. When I started, I wanted to have a means of connecting with my site's visitors, and I was leery of sending emails or establishing an email list because of potential problems when people report your newsletter as spam. So I thought, hey, they can subscribe to the blog and it's going to be just like a newsletter to them that way. This has been an experiment to me in that sense. I put the "Subscribe to my blog" box on my site... and got a few subscribers a day, you know, between 0 and 3 daily. Subscriber numbers got between 250 and 300 and seemed to start slowing down. I was thinking, these numbers aren't growing real fast. But I thought, well, that's just how many people want to listen to my blogging, so I wasn't worried about it either. Then came last summer. I keep reading all sorts of search engine optimization and marketing stuff, and based on those, it was very important to have an email li...