Homeschool Math Blog

I just learned about Vi Hart's "doodling in math class" videos (hat tip goes to Fawn Nguyen ). Vi calls herself mathemusician - and definitely, she's a talented and smart gal! I'm sure you'll enjoy her videos (as long as you can follow her super fast speeaking). Here are some that I enjoyed: Doodling in Math: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant [1 of 3] Here's a link to learn more about Fibonacci numbers in nature , so you can read about it at a slow pace : ) Binary Hand Dance was pretty cool too! Her series of "mathematical doodling" videos have become somewhat of a viral success. Here's one more: Doodling in Math Class: Infinity Elephants

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...

This was such a fun video to watch! This guy makes an icosahedron from plastic plates, and then from plastic cups - and one more from just plastic and duct tape. It can serve as a fun summer math project for kids who love explorations, cutting, gluing, building, and that sort of stuff! He is hilarious! See the video: Video from Makezine.com Read the instructions for the icosahedrons Find out what is an icosahedron

Today I want to highlight a blog called Math Notations by Dave Marain that specializes in math enrichment problems such as various type challenges and investigations. And they are quite good! For example, recently Dave posted a geometry problem , and even gave the answer in his post, but he asked the readers to find DIFFERENT ways to solve the problem. I encourage you to go see the problem and see how many different ways you can find to solve it! That is exactly what we can ask students too - especially if you have many students and some of them solve the original problem in no time. You can use the same problem as a basis for further investigations for them. His blog has "labels" in the sidebar, which makes it easy to find problems on a particular topic or concept.