BrainPOP's Spotlight This Month is Practical Math

Spotlight: Practical MathCount On Us

Thanks to our May Spotlight: Practical Math, your days of searching for engaging math resources are numbered! Practical Math includes topics like Comparing Prices, Customary Units, Division, Estimating, Graphs, Interest, Metric Units, Percents, Scale Drawing, Rounding, and Statistics. K-3 teachers can turn to BrainPOP Jr.'s Inches and Feet, Basic Subtraction, Basic Addition, Dollars and Cents, and more. BrainPOP ESL's movie A High Probability (Level 3, Unit 4, Lesson 3) teaches infinitives as Moby uses probability to rack up orange gumballs. On GameUp, related titles include Battleship Numberline (PlayPower Labs), Flower Power (Mangahigh), A Tangled Web (Mangahigh), Pyramid Panic (Mangahigh), Lure of the Labyrinth: Employee Lounge (Maryland Public Television/MIT Education Arcade), Pearl Diver (New Mexico State University), and Monster School Bus (New Mexico State University). Practical Math lesson plans are another great resource.

100 SMARTBoard Lessons for Elementary

Thank you to Sean Junkins for sharing this page of SMARTBoard resources for elementary schools.  They are clickable to download and organized by subject and grade.

TV 411

Nya:weh to Candy Browatzke who discovered this website that has videos on real life situations where people use the skills we teach in school in their everyday occupation or family environment.  It's called TV411 and if you click this link it will take you to the math video section.

There you will find all sorts of examples from carpenter math, sports math, financial math, musical math and how it relates to what we teach in school, like fractions, ratios, measurement, etc.

Deck the Halls!!

Christmas Math is spilling out into the hallways of our schools!

Check out OMSK's Grade 3 Christmas scenes, complete with measured houses and conical conifers!

Then scroll further to see the stacked measurements of ILTO's Grade 2 Christmas tree towers.  Scrunched inbetween are some reindeer, with complete instructions on how to make one yourself!

Now that's combining numeracy and literacy in a fun, festive way.

 

 

The Right Hand Turn Problem

Thank you to Peter Child from BASEF for sharing this problem.  Lots of math involved in this experiment, from simpler measurement concepts of distance to greater mathematical concepts to do with speed, velocity and perceived space and the rate of which one's eyes can determine distance.

 

Haunted Math Houses

Spooky math is happening in Mrs. D. Hill's grade 3 classroom at OMSK.  Students were each given a milk carton, which they then had to measure accurately with their rulers.  Next, they had to use those measurements to cut out the right size covering for their haunted houses.  Like any proper contractor, the measurements had to be designed to fit perfectly, so that the milk carton was completely covered, with no overlap or insides showing.  Take a look at these amazing Haunted Houses. I bet Mike Holmes would claim that Mrs. D. Hill's class knows how to "Make it Right!"