There were 742 Placements from Grades 1-4 across Canada, who made the National Mathematics Honour Rolls.  And several others from all grades from other countries, with more details to come, as results roll in.

Categories included Thales; Byron-Germain; Fibonacci; Pythagoras; Math Kangaroo Tournament of Towns; Canadian National Math League; New Jersey National Math League Honour Roll; American Mathematics Competition Honour Roll; Brock University Caribou Math Competition; Centre for Education in Math and Computing Honour Roll (University of Waterloo);

List of Learners’ names to come soon!

http://www.spiritofmath.com

http://www.spiritofmath.com/2011contest/

If you want your class to enjoy one of our Fun Learning Games, downloadable hands-on learning tools, here are a few really great ones:

Quiz Master:  http://www.math-lessons.ca/review/math-review5.html

Race; Fractions Board Game:  http://www.math-lessons.ca/activities/FractionsBoard5.html

Most kids LOVE pizza, so make it fun and bring REAL pizza into the classroom, several if parents are okay with chipping in on the cost or if the principal authorizes this as a project.  Or, do what we did, and bring in the ingredients, borrow the home economics room, and cook them right there in the classroom. If neither of these possibilities is viable, then divide the kids into groups of different numbers and ask them to draw a simple picture of a pizza on a piece of paper, with the number of slices drawn equal to the number of kids in their group.

Once the pizzas have either arrived, or are baked, cut each pizza into different numbers of sections. If it is real-life cooked pizzas, still have everyone draw first, a picture of their group’s pizza on their paper.  Write underneath the pic the whole fraction of the total number of slices and the whole number that equals.  How many for all the pizzas?

Divide the kids into groups, and ask each group to agree on what the fractions of the pizza are as the slices are being divvied up between the students.   (For drawn pizzas, use scissors to cut the slices out and place them together into a whole pizza pie on their table.  Have each student write down on a piece of paper, what fraction is “their” piece of the pizza – if their slice is the 3^rd slice, and the pizza was divided into 8 slices, she / he writes down 3/8.  Have the student, then answer what fraction of the pizza is left in the box (or on the plate).  In reference to this example, the student would answer 5/8.  As 8/8 –  3/8 = 5/8ths.

As everyone is then eating their pizza, (or pretend eating for those doing the drawn pizzas), discuss which number of their fraction is the denominator and which one is the numerator.  Explaining of course, that the numerator of the fraction is the top number and the denominator of the fraction is the bottom number.

This is a most delish-ious way of teaching fractions in the elementary classroom.  Or, for the drawn pizza class, a delish-ious idea to do first in class on paper, and then bring home to ask parents to cook with them.

Here is another one of our Fun Learning Pizza Games!

http://www.math-lessons.ca/activities/pizza-fractions.html

Making the task of teaching elementary math a little easier on the shoulders of the teachers, here is a checklist of goals for the year, to check off through the year, and give yourself a pat on the back for all of your teaching efforts and successes.  Given all that teachers do in the run of a teaching day, month, term and year, saying thank you is the least any of us can do.

At the year’s end, you can ask yourself if your Learners are Able to:

• Feel good about themselves whether they have the answers correctly or incorrectly divide by multiples of 10, 100, and 1000
• Understand and make basic home economic money-wise decisions such as buying groceries
• Grasp fractions, whole numbers, proportions, and percentiles
• Make a graph, understand a graph
• Use deductive reasoning – such as assessing shapes and figures in geometry and how they relate to each other
• Add, subtract, and multiply fractions

Adding, subtracting, and multiplying fractions all connect with a broader goal of understanding parts or part and whole of all life ideas and circumstances. The mind develops conceptual ratios, proportions, and percentiles, as we walk through a market or a neighborhood.  These become the building blocks of learning algebra and calculus in the later years – conceptual models developing in the mind of building a bridge, for example.

Books and curriculum are tools to achieve these goals for teaching and learning in the elementary classroom, but the process of achieving or attempting to achieve the goals is the real success for both the learners and the Teachers.

For some fun, using games to teach and learn math, here are a few ideas:

http://www.math-lessons.ca/activities/index.html.

1) Kids seem to have trouble saying decimals correctly. The Human Decimal Machine is a way of helping them. On pieces of construction paper, write the digits 0 through 9, and another one with a decimal point, and give one to each learner to represent the card. Tell them the way each one says the decimal point is using the word “and.” Tell them that whoever is to the right of the decimal must be called either “tenths” or “hundredths” or “thousandths,” etc. Have different kids with their cards rearrange themselves and then the other kids read the decimal correctly. For instance, if the persons holding the 9, the decimal and the 5, stand before the class, the kids should read it respectively, as ‘Nine’ ‘and’ ‘five’ ‘tenths’.

2) Using money is one of the most intuitive ways to teach about decimals. Divide your kids into three groups. Give one group play money and coins, give another group a play / cut-out “pie”, and give a third group some dominos. The idea here is to go from the known to the unknown. Most kids know what a dollar looks like, what a half dollar is, and what a “quarter” dollar is. (Explain that a quarter is another way of saying “one fourth” or “one out of four”.) Begin by showing visually that two half dollars make one whole dollar; four quarter dollars — or four “fourth dollars” make one whole dollar, etc. Now translate to non-monetary items: If there are two “half dollars” in a whole, then how many half-pies are in a whole? Use dominoes to illustrate similar points. After students understand the easy ones, move one to dimes, explaining that they are “hundredths.”

3) Decimal Bingo. This only works for kids who have just learned fractions. Cover your Bingo boards with decimals. When you call out the spaces, call them out as fractions. They must locate the decimal equivalent to cover that spot on their board.

4) For an idea for using money to teach decimals, make up a realistic restaurant menu. Tell the students to order what they want, but they have to add up how much money they’ll need. This fun exercise involves the kids in adding decimals.

You’ll find that these four ideas will have your elementary kids looking forward to their decimal lessons.

Here are some of our fun learning games On Decimals:
http://www.math-lessons.ca/activities/OneEquals.html (decimals, fractions, percentiles and money)

http://www.math-lessons.ca/Decimals/decimal.html

http://www.math-lessons.ca/Decimals/decimalBoard4.html

1) Working smarter to keep their attention.  Elementary kids cannot focus on a long, drawn-out lecture for 45 minutes.  Generally, they need to change up what they’re doing every 10 to 15 minutes.  So if you have a 50 minute class, be prepared to change up what they’re doing about four or five times. This keeps it fresh and flowing!

2) We have to fill the child’s day with interactive activities. Kids won’t recite multiplication tables for 50 minutes, or memorize 50 states without some sort of fun game to do it through. Instead, we have them talk and share. Including activities like puzzles, games and role playing shows, has them learning by doing.

3) We practice patience.  In most cases, young children genuinely want to learn.  Katy doesn’t keep missing those subtraction questions to irritate us.  She just doesn’t understand it, so rather than be fooled by upset, we exercise patience, find the root of the problem, and help her to overcome it.

4) We show that we value the student.  This actually applies to any age level, but with elementary students, it’s critically important.  We’re teaching these kids at a time when they’re developing their self-esteem. When we show them that they’re important by asking them to help us with chores like “leading the line” to lunch or by cleaning the erasers or by complimenting them in class, these things tell the student that they are important and needed in the classroom.

5) We involve them in team-building activities. Team-building activities are healthy for all students, but is essential for elementary kids.  Without team-building activities, the child tends to be very selfish.  Involving him or her early in working as a team takes the child’s focus off him/herself as a lone individual and places it with others as a group.  Games, puppet shows, and role playing in small groups are examples of ways to teach children to cooperate with others.

Our latest Math Activity Game is called Hex-A-Race.  It is a very fun floor (or table) game designed for Grades 4-6, and is a very interactive activity with teams, focusing on adding and subtracting mostly, with multiplication and division using small numbers:

http://math-lessons.ca/activities/HexaRace.html

http://www.arcademicskillbuilders.com/games/meteor/meteor.html

And for one of our fun games for teaching multiplication, division, subtraction and addition, you can try our Quiz Master:

http://www.math-lessons.ca/review/math-review4.html

Instructions:

Tic Tac Toe with times tables is a very simple yet motivational game for students.

1. The teacher separates the classroom into two big groups – one group of students is called the X’s and the other group is referred to as the O’s.

2. One person from each X and O group is called up to the board and given a pen.

3. When the students are ready, the teacher then says the multiplication table problem that needs to be solved. The student who answers correctly and writes the correct answer on the board is also awarded the X or O (depending on what team they are on) to place on the grid on the board.

4. Once the first person has gone up to the board, the process is repeated until everyone has had a turn. This is used as not only a score board, but to see which side of the classroom can successfully complete a full row of X’s or O’s.

Tips:

It doesn’t have to end there. If the kids really get into this game, you don’t have to announce a winner at the end of the first lesson. You can let them know that you are keeping track of who is winning and continue playing week to week. You can even have them play twice a week. This will keep them excited about each time they play and they will know that if their team didn’t do well on the first lesson they still have a chance to win the next time around.

You can also reward the students with the most correct answers by allowing each student to be the team captain. If there are more than two students, you can have them take turns until everyone is able to be the team captain.

To make this game even more interesting you can reward the students with a variety of treats. A good idea would be to purchase candies that are circular and X-shaped. One possibility is sour apple rings for O’s and gummy worms for X’s.

After trying this, you will see that Tic Tac Toe with times tables is a very simple and yet, still motivational game.

…….and for review, here is an additional fun game for learning times tables:

http://www.math-lessons.ca/timestables/times-tables.html

Did you know that most people in general tend to do better with any activity when they are competing against someone else? One great way to accomplish this is to incorporate a technique through a fun and stimulating school activity.  The way that this game works is that each student is given different times-tables problems.

Each problem is given a certain point amount. For each correctly solved problem that the student has correct, they are assigned the amount of points associated with that problem.  For example, 1×1=1, they would be given 1 point; 2X2=4, and so on. If the student answers the problem incorrectly, they do not gain any points.  As a matter of fact, they lose the amount of points that correspond to the problem they answered incorrectly. This technique gets the children even more interested in learning multiplication tables as well as answering the problems correctly. It will also get them motivated to correctly answer the equations, especially those with the higher numbers so they can accumulate more points.

At the end of the assignment each student’s score is added up and the person with the most correct problems, as well as the most points is designated as the winner. If there is more then one winner, then you can do a sudden death match and have each player compete against each other until there is a winner. Or you can reward both of them with the title of “Multiplication Masters” and they can be the designated team leaders when you play this game another time.

You can also add even more fun to this game by breaking the class up into teams and assigning 5 players to each team. This allows the students a chance to interact with each other and learn the value of teamwork, plus for those students that are struggling they will be able to work with other students that can help them out.

By incorporating this fun game into your teaching plan, learning multiplication tables will be a lot more fun for kids, plus they will benefit from working with other students. They will also learn a valuable lesson that integrates the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

This activity involves a great deal of imagination while at the same time it allows them to use their ability to use fractions in order to complete this creative assignment. This activity will be sure to intrigue the students and convince some of them that maybe math isn’t all that bad afterall.

Materials:

270 miniature sugar cubes, (this is 18 sugar cubes per group of 2 at 15 groups if your class consists of 30 students)

Construction paper- 15 pieces

Instructions:

Teachers divide the class into groups of 2. Each group is then given 18 sugar cubes to construct their pyramid. Every time the students complete a row for the foundation of the pyramid they have to write a fraction down on paper, stating how many sugar cubes they used to construct the bottom layer. Let’s say they used 7 to construct the bottom layer. Since there are 18 total cubes for the assignment, the denominator will always be 18. Therefore, the faction for the first problem is 7/18.

The students would then continue this exercise and the construction of their pyramid until all of the sugar cubes have been used. Once they have completed the assignment, they can then add up all of the fractions they have written down. This would then equal the total amount of sugar cubes used to make the entire pyramid.  The students will not only have used fractions as a way to produce the pyramid, but they will also have something interesting to show for their work. This activity can also be adjusted to different grade levels by the complexity integrated.

Tips:

Once the students have made their own pyramid, they can also come together with another group and make a bigger pyramid which will test their fractions skills even more.

To make this activity even more interesting teachers can have the students create different shapes or objects with the sugar cubes and state how many sugar cubes were used in their design.

…..And for additional review, here is another pyramid fractions game using Chocolate!

http://www.math-lessons.ca/activities/chocolate.html

This game is ideal for students in grades 5-7.  Students will learn how to compare fractions with one another.

Materials:

Mini-smarties candy bag

Smarties lab worksheets

Markers or crayons -yellow, red, brown, pink, blue, orange

Poster Paper

The entire length of this lesson would take about 1 hour of time. You can also adjust the time to fit your needs.

1. Have students pair with another student so that there are groups of 2.

2. Have the students motivated about this game by asking leading questions, for instance:

-Tell me what your definition of a fraction is?

-How can we make fractions?

3.Explain to the students the purpose of the worksheets and explain the directions of the lab.

4.Ask the students if they need help or have any questions before you start.

5.Have the students separate  the smarties candy by color.

6.The students can then create their own fractions by using the amount of smarties they have in comparison to (whole) the different colors of the Smarties (part).

7.Have the students draw a circle and using their poster paper they can then divide the circle into the amount of Smarties that they have in their bag.

8.Once the students have completed their project, you can then go around the room and have an open discussion about their findings.

Tips:

Teachers can also allow the kids to eat the smarties candy after they have completed the project. This works as an added incentive for the students. Plus, they will be rewarded for a job well done!  Teachers can also reward the person with the most creative point of view and or the best explanation of their findings by giving them an additional box of smarties candy.

…and one other fun fractions game for Grades 5/6:

http://www.math-lessons.ca/activities/FractionsBoard5.html