Working with a student who is bored in math? Quickly finishing lessons? Needs something more? Here are three ways you can get started differentiating in math.
100%, 100%, 100%. If you've ever taught gifted students math, you're probably familiar with those kids who can knock perfect scores out week after week. You've probably also questioned what good you're doing for those students. A differentiated math program may be just what you need.
Here are four key attributes I look for when developing math projects: juicy data, interesting conflict, an expert's lens, and a final product.
So, just how much pasta could I cook in an Olympic-sized pool?
Let’s move beyond memorizing definitions and get kids grappling with the fascinating concept of infinity!
What if we used a universal theme to guide our study of fractions? These very big ideas get students thinking about fractions in a new way.
According to Costello, 7 × 13 = 28. In fact, watch him prove it…
If your students can find the area of a square then, armed with Google Earth, they can also figure out how many students you could pack into your school’s playground.
Here’s a quick to learn but difficult to master math game. Start with some basic divisibility rules, but then feel free to extend it to any math topic.
Go across disciplines by asking students to write a story about fraction equivalence.
So once your students can calculate volume… what do you have them do next? In this math project, kids will look up historic laptops, calculate their volumes, and note how technology has changed over time.
Sure gasoline seems expensive. Until you try to fill your car up with other liquids!
Sometimes we can learn a lot by doing something the wrong way. Here are six ways your students can purposefully design awful, misleading graphs.
Do your students realize that addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are all examples of the same idea: an operation? And that it’s quite possible to create a brand new operation? Let’s do it!
Discovering what is interesting and unexpected about a triangle’s angles. What twists have I unintentionally spoiled for my students over the years?
The calendar is a source of fantastic factoring problems with many social studies add-ons. Why 12 months? Why 30 (or 31 or 28) days? Why are weeks 7 days long? Why don’t they fit into the months (or the year!)? Why did we do this to ourselves!?
I love collecting links to articles with fun math applications. Here are three of my recent favorites.
Is it possible to save money by commuting to San Francisco from Las Vegas?
A reader wrote in, asking how to differentiate for a task like reading analog clocks. What to do with a student who has mastered this skill? What’s a good math clock project?
Continuing our series on long-term success, we look at the art of wondering. Often our gifted kids wonder deeper and longer than others. But do they wonder about math?
Students learn about prime numbers early in their careers, but the true, quirky nature of these numbers isn’t really explored unless kids go on to become math majors. Here are three fun prime explorations suitable for even young students.
It’s easy to fall in love with chasing the newest technology to use in the classroom. But sometimes, the perfect tool is a plain old calculator. We’ll be using this tool to develop curiosity about math.
Palindromes are one of those fun ideas that some gifted kids just latch onto. We’ll check out palindromic words, phrases, and even numbers in this article.
Creativity and math may seem completely incompatible. Math is when students follow predefined steps to arrive at an exact answer! Here are four ideas for quick math warmups that encourage students to use divergent, creative thinking.
How long will it take to get a million dollars if you start with a penny and double it?
In the paper, I read about Norway’s dominance of the Winter Olympics, despite being a tiny country. I love this juxtaposition of unexpected data! Let’s turn it into a math project. Here are some questions I thought of…
What kind of math project could you build based on the shrinking dimensions of seats on the Boeing 777?
Our look at math conjectures continues with Goldbach’s Conjecture, which states that all even integers greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes. Is this true for all cases? Another authentic, unsolved question.