Q: What is the area of pi?
A: pi R^2?
R: Pie are not square. Pie are round. Cornbread are square.

So I decided to resurrect some turkey jokes, sans math. I’ll admit that you may have heard some of these before. But I know some young kids who will think these are completely original – and pretty funny!

Q: What did the turkey say to the turkey hunter?
A: “Quack, quack, quack!”

Q: What did the turkey say before it was eaten?
A: Boy! I’m stuffed!

Q: Why did the Pilgrims want to sail to America in the spring?
A: Because April showers bring Mayflowers.

Q: Why did they let the turkey join the band?
A: Because he had the drumsticks

Q: Why did the turkey cross the road?
A: Because it was the chicken’s day off.

When everyone is going around the table saying what they are thankful for, say, “I’m thankful I didn’t get caught.” Then refuse to say anything more.

Q: What kind of music did the Pilgrims like?
A: Plymouth Rock

Q: Which side of the turkey has the most feathers?
A: The outside

Q: How do you keep a turkey in suspense?
A: I’ll let you know next week!

These are just a few of my favorites – but I’d love to hear your best turkey jokes!

When students play DreamBox, they can choose from a number of different adventures with a Dinosaurs theme. They can join silly Professor Pickles, Dr. Kim, Hasan, and Misha as they explore a museum and travel to the time of the dinosaurs. While they’re there, students play math lessons and earn rewards as they hunt for hiding dinosaurs, track tyrannosaurus footprints, or free a triceratops from the tar pit!

Now you can download the PDF for the next in our series of coloring pages. When you print it out, your child can “Help Professor Pickles and the gang get home in the time machine!”

The developers, designers. and teachers  at DreamBox have enjoyed creating a fun world of dino time travel for kids to explore. We hope your kids have just as much fun discovering these fanciful worlds as they learn math!

If you haven’t already, be sure to download the Adventure Park coloring page, so your kids can color Stella and her friends the colors of the rainbow.

Good luck future paleontologist!

Time is running out, so enter our Dream Big Kids Contest before it’s too late. Remember, if you’re a teacher you can enter your classroom and try to win the $1,000 cash grand prize or a 1-year free DreamBox Math Classrooms for 24 students.

Contest video spotlight

Words don’t do justice to this video. See it for yourself! And check out our “Nurse-ry” rhyme contest reminder below. Then, go take a look at the of the Dream Big contest entries and be sure to vote for your favorite to win big!

Video from kids contest

Nursery rhyme reminder

The time is running out! But don’t pout. The contest isn’t over; the judging isn’t done. Ask your kids to dream big for fun! There’s a $1,000 grand prize. But only for the dream that’s the biggest in size.

When kids play DreamBox Learning K-2 Math, they explore the DreamBox Adventure Park, an amazing place where kids go on many different adventures as they solve problems and learn math! Students choose their adventures from four themes: Pirates, Pixies, Dinosaurs, and Pet Friends. The DreamBox themes, stories, and adventures were inspired by suggestions from kids who were the early DreamBox testers.

Children are shown the way to the Adventure Park by Stella – their friend and “tour guide.” When kids first begin DreamBox, Stella helps them find the key that opens the park, and introduces them to the adventure friends.

Now you can print out the first in a series of new DreamBox coloring pages, and meet “Stella and her friends in the Adventure Park!” Download the Coloring Book PDF so your kids can enjoy some coloring fun!

Would you also like to print out color posters of the DreamBox friends? You can download:

• The Pixies poster
• The Dinosaurs poster
• The Pet Friends poster
• The Pirates poster

Have fun, and watch for the other coloring pages to come from DreamBox!

Dream Big musician

Enter your big dreamer in our contest. You could win a $1,000 cash prize or a DreamBox subscription for your family or classroom. Every family that enters gets a free 1-month trial to our math game for kids in kindergarten through second grade.

At the very least, you’ll have a video time capsule for when your children grow up. By the time they get to college, they may not remember wanting to be a butterfly or Jedi  but you will. And you’ll have it all captured on video for you to remind them and laugh about! See other entries to our kids contest here. Don’t forget to vote for your favorites!

Pumpkin-O-Meter

After your ghastly ghoul or pretty princess reaches their quota for candy, show your children the importance of pumpkin math, and calorie counting with the Pumpkin-O-Meter presented by kidsHealth.org.

In this counting exercise, the Pumpkin-O-Meter teaches kids how each candy possesses a different caloric value. As children drag and drop the candy into the pumpkin’s mouth, they learn how much candy is too much (like eight large candy bars) all while practicing counting and addition. When they add too much candy to the pumpkin, he gets sad and candy falls out of his sides (which is the same way we feel when we eat too much candy).

Since children shouldn’t consume half their daily calories in candy, the Pumpkin-O-Meter calorie counter is also a wonderful lesson on the importance of controlling their sugar intake. As children experiment with different candy combinations they learn small candy has fewer calories than large candy, and that we should all eat candy in moderation.

Post-Halloween Neighborhood Cleanup

A fun way to promote Green Halloween is to organize a morning-after neighborhood cleanup. Gather all your friends and family the morning after Halloween and take a stroll through the neighborhood to pick up loose candy wrappers or garbage on the street.

This is a great family activity for young ones as it teaches the importance of responsibility, while providing an outlet for fresh air and exercise after all that candy. You can also turn the neighborhood cleanup into a fun counting game by awarding a prize to the child who picks up the most pieces of litter.

For more educational and fun Green Halloween ideas and activities, visit GreenHalloween.org.

Pumpkin Math Jokes

Q: If I had seven pumpkins on the one hand and eight pumpkins on the other, what would I have?
A: Big hands!

Q:  If I had five pumpkins and I gave you three, how many would I have left?
A:  I don’t know.
Q:  Why not?
A:  In our school we do all our arithmetic in apples and oranges.

Q:  What do you get if you divide the circumference of a jack-o-lantern by its diameter?
A:  Pumpkin Pi!
(OK, that one’s a repeat, but it’s worth repeating)

I also have a few that have nothing to do with math, but my 6-year-old joke tester thought they were funny — and hey, it’s a Halloween, so let’s have a little fun!

Q:  How do you make a witch scratch?
A:  Just take away the W.

Q:  Why did the vampire’s lunch give her heartburn?
A:  It was a stake sandwich.

Q:  What do you call a man who gets a pumpkin pie in the face?
A:  Desserted.

Q:  What do skeletons say before eating?
A:  Bone appétit…

Q:  When is a pumpkin not a pumpkin?
A:  When you drop it; then it’s squash!

Q:  What is a Mummies’ favorite type of music?
A:  Wrap!!

Speaking of wrap,  that’s all I’ve got– until next Halloween!

Pumpkin Birthday Cake

Studies by the National Center for Health and Statistics, and Anybirthday.com both conclude the most common birthday in North America is on October 5th. The reason? Hint: New Year’s Eve.

In honor of the estimated 968,000 Americans blowing out their candles in early October, the Birthday Paradox is an interesting learning exercise to help math students grasp the probabilities of a pair.

Beware. Some of these statistics are well beyond the elementary “pumpkin math” exercises in this month’s DreamBox Learning math activities calendar, but the little ones should still be able to walk away with the general idea of how the birthday paradox works.

The birthday paradox asks the question, “what’s the probability that, in a set of randomly chosen people, will any given pair share the same birthday?” We call it a “paradox” because people have a hard time assuming someone else in the general vicinity shares the same birthday. We’re just too self centered.

In addition, our minds have a hard time computing the power of exponents (especially if our little test subjects don’t know what exponents are).

The Birthday Paradox Equation

Let’s walk through this together. First of all, we need to consider what what we’re solving for in this mess of number and letters. Our original question is “What’s the probability a pair of people will share a birthday in a group?”

To start, we need to know the size of the group. Any classroom size should work, but for this example we’re using a group size of 23. Now, we can ask “what’s the probability a pair of people will share a birthday in a group of 23 people?”

Here comes that word “paradox” again. It’s logical to assume 23 people is too small of a group to think two individuals will share the same birthday out of 365 possible days to be born. The math shows otherwise.

If you’re presenting this problem to a group that is a little green when it come to statistics, introduce the coin flipping experiment. When we flip a coin, we know it’s a 50/50 chance that a coin flip will land on tails, but how likely will a coin land on tails 10 times in a row?

You might think to divide the 50% likelihood with the 10 coin flips (.5/10), but you’d be wrong. Instead, you need to multiply the 50% likelihood to the 10^th exponent (.5^10) to equal .001 or 1/1000.

It’s a one in a thousand chance that a coin flip will land on tails ten times in a row.

Asking the question of how likely it is for two people to share a birthday in a group of 23 is just like asking, “How likely will a coin land on tails at least once in 23 coin flips?”

You’ll make your head hurt with all the possibilities. Tails can land on the 2^nd throw. Maybe on the last throw. Maybe tails hits on every odd number. You can guess it will happen, but you don’t know when.

How do we solve the coin flip problem?

You can’t think about how likely the coin will land on tails without considering how unlikely the coin will land on tails. If it’s less than a .1% chance that a coin will land on heads ten times in a row, much less 23 times in a row, then there’s a 99.9% chance a coin will land on tails at least once in 23 tries.

The trick is to subtract the chance of getting all heads from 1, and we can find the prospect of our desired outcome.

Solving the Birthday Paradox

Good, you’re still with me. Back to the problem of birthdays. Just like the coin flip, let’s ask how unlikely is it for a pair to share a birthday in a group of 23 people?

For the birthday paradox experiment, we also assume the following:

1. There are 365 days in a year (forget about those pesky leap years)
2. There are no twins in the group of 23

Start off by calculating how many pairs 23 people make. Since any one person out of 23 can make 22 different pairs, multiply 22 with the total number of people (23) and divide by the amount of people it takes to make a pair (2). This equals 253.

Now, you have to ask the question “how likely is it for a pair of people to not share a birthday in a year?” If a person’s birthday is Oct. 5th, that means their birthday occupies 1/365 of the year. We can assume someone else can be born on any of the 364 days of a 365 day year, and not share the same birthday.

Going back to the idea of coin flips, trying to find 253 different birthdays is like 253 tails flips in a row (assuming all birthdays are independent). Use the 253 as the exponent to the total non-matching birthdays (364) over the total days of the year (365):

The chance of a birthday match out of 23 people is:

1 – 49.95% = 50.05%.

It’s over 50%! Which means a group of 23 is more likely than not for two people to share a birthday.

Probability of a Pair Graph

This graph indicates the exponential growth of a probability of a pair based on the size of a group. At 57 people, the probability of a birthday match is 99%, and to reach 100%, you’ll need a group of 366 people.

Now Let’s Play!

Make this into a fun classroom activity by asking a class how likely it is that they share a birthday with someone else in the class.  You can also change the experiment.  Have the children secretly write down a number between 1 and 365, and ask them how likely is it that someone else picked the same number.

If you’d like a further explanation of the birthday paradox, BetterExplained has step-by-step instructions, as well as a birthday paradox calculator.  And if you have an October 5th birthday, comment below!

If you had fun with this October activity, check out our Pumpkin Math Activities Calendar.

Pumpkin humor

To kick off our favorite month, here’s a pumpkin joke:

Q: How do you mend a broken Jack-o-Lantern?

A: With a pumpkin patch!

OK, so maybe jokes aren’t our thing.  But pumpkin math activities are definitely our thing! Here’s our pumpkin math activities calendar to kick off October.

Pumpkin math activities

If you’re a math teacher, homeschooler, or an interested parent, have your students estimate the circumference  of a pumpkin by cutting yarn into pieces they think might fit around the pumpkin. Then, sort pieces by too short, too long, and just about perfect. This helps kids learn to estimate sizes.  After you do this pumpkin math activity, read It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

And don’t forget to get our free math activities and holiday calendar. You’ll be surprised to learn that Halloween isn’t the only holiday in October. We’ll bring you more cool pumpkin math activities and more all month, so check back soon!

Finding buried treasure requires good counting and number sense.  How many steps does it take to get to the spot marked with an X?

When you have dug up the treasure, how do you divide it among the crew?

If you have many kinds of coins in your treasure, how do you make sure that you have the most valuable coins?  Is a piece of eight worth the same as a Maria Theresa silver Mexican dollar?

If you are cruising in your ship close to shore, say a Treasure Island, taking soundings is a must.  How many feet are in a fathom?  What’s the draft of your ship and how many fathoms under the keel are needed for you to not run aground?
Understanding angles is very useful if you want to navigate nearshore, or by the sun and the stars.

Every pirate needs math! (And no matter what your child dreams of being someday, you can enter the DreamBox “Dream Big” video contest here!)

Presenting…Dream Big farmer

Ask your kids what they want to be and join in on the fun. The videos are already pouring in and we’re delighted to see the little ones dreaming big. Don’t forget to vote on your favorite! A lot is at stake for these young dreamers. Stay tuned for more videos!

You may now return to your regular programming….

Presenting 2 of our videos, “Dream Big Astronaut” and “Dream Big Geologist.”

Every child dreams big. Children have an amazing ability to turn off self-doubt and reach for every star. We at DreamBox Learning are deeply inspired by kids’ imaginative aspirations and long to share them with our community of parents, teachers, and homeschoolers. We created the Dream Big Video Contest, so everyone could delight in kids’ dreams.

HOW TO ENTER:

STEP 1: Record a digital video of your kid(s) telling us what they want to be when they grow up and why.

It could be anything, from an astronaut to Sponge Bob. The answer to “what do you want to be” may surprise you!

STEP 2: Upload your video to YouTube.

Trust us, it’s really easy, even for the tech-phobic.

• Create a YouTube user account
• Upload your video. Watch this instructional guide if you need help.
• In the “tags” field enter “DreamBox Learning”

STEP 3: Go to our contest entry page and enter your email address and YouTube video URL.

STEP 4. You’re entered! Now share; pass it along to your friends, family and everyone else.

The more votes you receive, the better chance you have to win our grand prize. Videos with the most votes get entered in the final round and our judges will pick the most creative and entertaining. Contest ends on November 30, 2009.

Prizes! Everyone Wins!

• One grand prize winner out of all our videos will receive $1,000.
• Five families will win 6-month subscriptions (for one child) to DreamBox Learning’s online math game (a $59.95 value!).
• Every family that enters wins a free 1-month trial to our math game.

Classroom Prizes!

This contest is for teachers and their classrooms too! Make your video part of a fun classroom project. Get ideas and tips for your teacher videos here.

• Your classroom could win the $1,000 grand prize!
• Three classrooms will win 1-year DreamBox Math Classroom licenses (a $1,200 value).
• Every family that enters wins a free 1-month trial to our math game.

Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar, by Masaichiro and Mitsumasa Anno

Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar is a math storybook for all ages
Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar, by Masaichiro and Mitsumasa Anno, is an engaging story about counting and so much more. It starts with the idea that there is a jar that contains one island, which has two countries, each of which has three mountains. This idea continues up to ten. Each page has only a little text with many pictures to illustrate the concepts. For example, on the page describing the three mountains, there are three mountains inside separate borders to help illustrate the concept.

As for math, Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar is full of concepts, both for younger and older children. For the younger kids, the story works as a counting book from one to ten. The bordered illustrations help with counting on each page. For second and third grade students, the book works as an introduction to multiplication where you can start with the smaller numbers and work up to the more difficult problems, such as eight times nine. For older children, the story introduces the idea of factorials. Students must already know multiplication in order to understand factorials, but this story does a great job of slowly introducing the pattern and building up to a full explanation at the end. As you can see, this is a great story to read with the whole family, because kids at different grade levels will relate to some part of the concepts discussed. It can also become a classic as a child grows up; you can return to it every couple of years and your child will discover something new each time!

What you can do to reinforce the ideas in Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar
There are a number of activities that will enhance the math introduced in this story, depending on the age of your child. For  younger children who are practicing counting, have them see how many houses are in your neighborhood, how many rooms are in your house, or how many jars or cans of catfood you have in a cupboard. Then compare those numbers to the numbers in the book. Is it reasonable to have six houses in a village, or should there be more?

For older children, activities should involve slightly harder math in order to keep them interested and learning. You could do a similar type of activity, though. Maybe see how many rooms there are in each village by doing six times seven. Then see how many rooms there are in your neighborhood or on your street by assuming that each house has the same number of rooms as yours. This will involve a journey outside to count houses, and then the multiplication to see how many rooms there are.

If your child is at the point of understanding factorials, the activities can start before you even finish reading the book. You can stop reading at the question, “How many jars were in the boxes all together?” See what your child thinks, and then re-read the story taking notes in order to figure out the answer together (it should be 3,628,800 or 10!). Compare your estimate to the answer, then finish reading the book. There is also a desk-arranging problem at the end of the book that your child can solve using the idea of factorials. If you are feeling creative, you can write and illustrate your own example of a factorial following the style of the book.

Whatever activity you choose to do, make sure you keep it fun. With summer winding down, your child is going to want to make the most of it!

We’d like to introduce our one-thousandth Twitter follower: Amanda Henson, (AKA High Impact Mom). Like most of us who work in the  DreamBox office, she’s a coffee addict.  She’s also a mother of two, avid Christian, closet geek, bargain hunter and environmental cheerleader.

Reaching people from all walks of life is really important to us.  Even though it was completely random that Amanda ended up as our 1,000 Twitter follower, we’re happy for the chance to get to know her better.

If you want to get to know us better, fan us on Facebook or Tweet with us at @DreamBox_Learn.  Don’t be shy!