Posts Tagged ‘Math games’

We hope your kids are having fun with our July summer activities calendar! Good news: we now have August and September event calendars...

I can remember making “trains” with upright dominoes as a child. It took a long time to set them up just right, but then it was so much fun to watch them falling into each other so quickly! It was kind of like watching a tiny roller coaster in motion.

The box claims this game is appropriate for ages 3+. It’s wrong. There’s just no way. Where do I even begin? There are so many chutes and ladders that it’s difficult to discern each individual box on the game board.

If you haven't heard, sponsors announced this year's theme for Math Awareness Month - it's Math and the Climate! Held every year in April, Mathematics Awareness Month was started to make others aware of how math affects our world.

World Maths Day (or World Math Day) was a smashing success. There were 2,001,570 total participants from 204 countries and a world record of 452,681,681 total questions answered in 48 hours.

I never liked this game, not even as a kid. However, I recognize the positive benefits of playing games with my 3-year-old Elle, and I could never deprive her...

Mathletes, human calculators, and DreamBoxers get ready!

If you have children, chances are good that they brought home a box of valentines this week…

Who says Valentine’s Day is only about Hallmark and sugar? Classrooms can find creative ways to expand this holiday into a great learning opportunity.

Recently, a friend of a friend who had reviewed our offering wrote to me and said, "Overall I find the business model of a monthly charge very strange for a children's learning software. Usually one buys a book or a CD/DVD for a one time price and can use it indefinitely. DreamBox's offering basically means that now parents need to pay over and over again if their kids want to revisit lessons or if they are just slow learners. A more appropriate pricing model would be to sell the service per lesson or grade level. That would appeal a lot more to me. Think about it. I have to spend $100 for one year of service and after that I basically lose access to the learning tools unless I continue paying. For $100 each year I get many learning software on CD/DVDs or books and I can keep them forever. That is a very easy decision in my mind."

Here at DreamBox, we recommend for best results that a student play at least twice a week for 15 minutes at a time. Some will play more. However, like Vitamin A, a lot more is not better. To take an extreme, a child playing 3 hours a day every day is crowding out too many other activities for a happy child.

Sorry, but this is a short commercial for a great non-profit program, The Math Olympiad. The program is a great way to get kids excited about doing fun and challenging math. I had a chance to be involved with this a couple years back when I co-coached our elementary school’s team. The kids really enjoyed the teamwork and competitive spirit of it – which are aspects generally missing from the math classroom.

I was at conference recently discussing DreamBox with a pretty savvy industry insider when she asked “what makes your product so unique?” My response was “It’s incredibly effective, fun, and highly individualized to a child’s particular learning needs.” That’s when she said it. “Individualized?! That’s what they all say!”

I renewed my love of Yahtzee a few months ago, in a little cottage in Hawaii when my husband and I discovered it was the only board game in the place. We were trapped inside at 7pm every night with our three month old baby and spent many hours playing this fun and competitive game. Yahtzee is fast paced, has the chance elements of winning big but also requires strategy. During the long days and nights with an infant it was also perfect because the game plays pretty quickly and can be renewed at any time

In the spirit of sharing fun at-home math activities with parents, here's a suggestion for a great game that gives kids an opportunity to practice mental math without the boring worksheets! At the suggestion of Alexandria Jones in her Lets Play Math blog, my family recently played Contig.