Wednesday, November 11, 2015

11/5 - Tangrams

We read two books about tangrams this week.  First was "Grandfather Tang's Story" by Ann Tompert.  Then we played with tangrams for a while.  Tangrams are an ancient Chinese puzzle consisting of 7 pieces: 5 triangles, 1 parallelogram, and 1 square.  The kids tried to make the animal shapes from the book as well as some shapes on worksheets I provided, then they worked on creating things from their imaginations (they did an awesome job).  At the end of class, we read "The Warlord's Puzzle" by Virginia Walton Pilegard.  One of the puzzles we had been working on was how to fit all of the tangram pieces into a square and this book gave the solution to the square puzzle.

10/29 - Dice Games

We had lots of fun playing with dice this week.  First we played a game called Hex (without dice), where the kids had to try and beat their partner across a game board by making a path of connected hexagons.  Then we played Contig and Math Dice.  The kids had to use addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division with the numbers on their dice to try and make certain numbers so they could earn more points than their opponent. 

10/22 - Math Curse

This week, we read the book "Math Curse" by Jon Scieska.  The child in the book feels cursed and can only think of everything as a math problem.  After reading the book, we went back and solved the math problems mentioned.  We talked about problem solving and the kids had an opportunity to create their own word problems to solve.