number gossip

Just found that in Tanya's Khovanova blog (http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/?page_id=2)

Number gossip - try this with your kids : http://www.numbergossip.com/

Non-standard problems

Going over non-standard math problems ( math riddles) books, I notice that they do repeat from book to book. Some of the problems are really ancient, they come to us from the indian and arabic tales, old monastery textbooks, etc. This makes me think that

1. they are non-trivial in any educational system

2. they tell us something about our brain

3. it is not trivial to come up with this type of problems.

So, my question is

1. what makes these problems non-trivial?

2. where are the people who know how to generate these problems?

3. how could I learn to generate these problems?

You inputs are welcome!

Best regards,

Julia

with straight lines

There are different problems that involve cutting. This one is a good one for young kids: how many pieces you could get while cutting a pie with 3 straight cuts? ( try to find all the solutions)

My kids were happy to explore this, even my 4 year old.

Math and science links for kids

Here are some links I find useful:

Math Kangaroo Olympiad

AIMS Educational Foundation

National Associations of Math Circles

Puzzles.com

The Logic Zone

National Library of Virtual Manipulatives

Los Alamos Mega Mathematics Project

Brainboosters


Young Inventors' Competitions

TryEngineering.org Games

Rockville Consortium for Science

Kids Science Challenge

Discovery Education

Digits, loved and hated

Yesterday my 7 year old daughter told me that there are digits she loves, and digits she hates. There are also digits that are so-so.
So, we assigned each digit a score ( -1,0 or 1) and tried to analyse long numbers with those scores.
For example, she says that she loves 5, hates 7 and is OK with 4.
Will she love 5547? ( yes, t0tal score is 1+1+0-1=1)
Will she love 7745474?
And so on.
We had a lot of fun.
You could also make it more complicated introducing scores in between, etc, graphing it and so on.

This is my first blog :)
I hope to learn more about math outside the classroom, homeschooling bright kids and new approaches to education, especially critical thinking and logic development.
Julia