Homeschool Math Blog

I have recently had the pleasure to add Make It Real Learning workbooks to my site. These books contain real-life math activities with real-life data, companies, and situations. They are written by Frank Wilson. Arithmetic I Fractions, Percents, and Decimals I Linear Functions I Calculus I Periodic and Piecewise Functions I Some examples of the topics included in these activities are: cell phone plans, autism, population growth, cooking, borrowing money, credit cards, life spans, population growth, and music downloads. But there are many more, more than I can list here. As students work through the problems, they can use the math skills and concepts they have learned in their math curriculum (such as the concept of average or graphing), and apply those to a situation from real life. Each activity-lesson in the book contains several questions about the situation, starting with basics and going into more in-depth evaluations, and should be adequate for one-two complete class periods. W...

Considering the crisis taking place within U.S. financial institutions, it's a good reminder of how we MUST teach our kids how to work out the math with credit cards, mortgages, and any type of loans. Murray Bourne from squareCircleZ has taken this matter to heart and has written a good lesson about math that goes into taking a loan. He's also analyzed several misleading credit card ads and figured out the TRUE interest rate (which you find out after reading the fine print). First go here: Credit Cards - a simplified discussion on how banks make money on credit cards. This is a must read for all people (young or old) who even consider taking a credit. Then check these posts and warn your youngsters: Misleading Credit Card Advertising . This ad advertises "a attractive interest rate of 5% p.a." (p.a. means per annum or yearly interest rate), but has a "small" administration fee of 6%. And then check another misleading credit card ad which advertises a 0% ...