Math for Love Lessons

In just a minute I'm going to share an amazing set of lessons from Math for Love. But first, a bit of a rant.

This has been a weird and, for many of us, terrible week or two. Please don't focus on all the ways in which you are "falling short" in helping your kids with homeschooling. There are things that schools can do that you simply don't have the time, experience, and supplies to achieve.

BUT ALSO

There is so much you can do at home that a school simply cannot do. You can give your kids tons of individual attention. You can turn lectures into conversations. You can follow their interests and take a wild left turn into anything they want to learn about!

And most importantly, you can have fun spending time with your kids. In fact, that's the most important thing any of us can be doing right now. We might be cooped up with our kids for a long time, and it's going to be easier if those kids still like seeing us in the morning. Even if that means that the (hastily assembled) packet of worksheets from your kids' school doesn't get finished on time.

Ok, rant over. If you remain unconvinced, I have good news - I'm about to share a bunch of lessons that you can try out with your kids.

But I reserve the right to rant again next week...

In addition to making great games like Prime Climb and Tiny Polka Dot, Math for Love also has a set of math lessons for teachers that are categorized by grade level and content.

I haven't gotten to spend as much time on these lessons as I have on the games, so I decided to pick a lesson at random and test it out. And guess what? It was fantastic.

The lesson I chose follows all the values that Dan espoused in his TED Talk: It's fun, based on exploration and discovery, and breaks down the barrier between teacher-as-answer-key and student-as-mindless-calculator.

Let's check it out.

The Billiard Ball Problem

The Billiard Ball Problem is appropriate for anyone in 4th grade or above. As a former middle school teacher, I could imagine my kids loving this activity.

First, you draw a rectangle on some grid paper. The sides should each be some number between 3 and 8. In the example shown, we see a 4x6 rectangle.

Pretend this is a billiard table and you are shooting a ball diagonally from the bottom lefthand pocket. If the ball keeps bouncing off the rails of the billiard table, will it eventually fall into a pocket? Which one?

That's it! Well, not really. That's just the beginning. As the full lesson describes, you can use this as an initial prompt to answer all sorts of questions such as

Can you predict which pocket the ball will fall into, just by knowing the dimensions of the table?
How many times will the ball bounce off the rails before going in? Can you predict that as well?
Will the ball ever fall back into the bottom lefthand pocket? Why or why not?

The goal with this exploration is not necessarily to answer all these questions. The goal is to get your kids excited about exploring a new mathematical terrain. Who knows, they might abandon the idea entirely, only to find themselves doodling rectangles on their paper in a week or three. After all, we've got plenty of time...

Note that this is just one lesson of dozens that are available at the Math for Love site. So click on over, choose your child's grade, and see what you can find!