January 2022
Welcome to EFM's January Newsletter!
Collaborate With Us!
Family Math Festivals: EFM is exploring creating Family Math Festivals. These would be for families with very young children, and would be a blend of Math Festivals and schools' Family Math Nights. The participants would be adult/child pairs who would play math activities together. A family math festival could be a small gathering of one to five pairs, or it could be as large as one hundred pairs. It could be held in a neighborhood, a community center, a library, or educational institution. It would introduce families to the wonderful possibilities of playing with math together at home using a program such as EFM. If this interests you, please write to me about working together.
Annotated Storybooks: It is time for EFM to improve its storybooks. We plan on making them more intentional and directed in their use of math vocabulary and math topics. We will also be simplifying the commentaries and making them less verbose. If this interests you, please write to me about working together.
Website, Graphics, Activities, and More: If you have graphic design or user experience expertise and wish we would improve the look of some of our materials, we would welcome your help in improving them. If you are a person with programming skills and wish EFM would have a way to provide a filtered list of activities on its website, we would be glad of your help. If you have new activities, want to revise some of our existing ones, want to add illustrations, or want to rearrange the progression of the activities, we would welcome your collaboration. If you are intrigued by doing a project with us, please write to me and let's work together!
New Activities to Enjoy!
This month we have chosen some activities from TERC's Mixing In Math program. The nonprofit TERC has many interesting math education programs including their "Make Connections: You and Me and Math" and their multicultural "Storytelling Math" series of storybooks.
Chapter 2 – 3 — Twenty Pennies
Start by putting one penny in the bank. A player's turn after that is to roll a die. The player puts that many pennies in the bank. However, each player has the option once during the game of passing and not using the roll. If the total in the bank stays less than 20, play continues. If the total becoms exactly 20, the player wins. If the total becomes more than 20, the player loses.
For younger players, you can use a smaller total, say 10, and you can choose randomly from a shuffled collection of number cards from 1 to 4 (or if you are using a die, discard rolls higher than 4).
Chapters 3 — Roll the Bank
Each player gets 10 tokens, and the "bank" also gets 10 tokens. During a turn, a player rolls a die and does one of the following depending on the roll:
1) take a token from the bank
2) give a token to the bank
3) do nothing and your turn is over
4) take half the tokens in the bank
5) put half your tokens in the bank
6) roll again.
Note that if you are taking half of an odd number of tokens, you should first add 1 to the number so that taking half will work out evenly. If a player runs out of tokens, they lose. If a player takes the last token from the bank, they win.
There are lots of variations that you can create. One possibility is that if you roll a 4 you have a choice of taking half the tokens from the bank or from a player of your choosing. Another possibility is to start with a different number of tokens.
Chapter 3 – 4 — Same as Seven
Choose a target, say 7. During a round, three dice are rolled and these numbers are used by all the players. The challenge is to use addition and subtraction of the three numbers on the dice to get as close to the target as possible. For example, if the target is 7 and 2, 3, and 5 are rolled, then 5 + 3 - 2 would win with a difference of 1 over 5 + 3 + 2 which has a difference of 3. If a child is comfortable with multiplication or division, then those can be allowed as well. For example, (2 x 5) - 3 gives exactly 7.
You can play with a winner for each round, or you can take the total of each player's differences over three rounds and see who has the lowest total. You can also vary the target number of the number of dice you use.
Chapters 5 — Blockade
Mark off a region on a piece of graph paper. For example, the region might have 12 rows and 12 columns. Decide on a rectangle size - a size of 12 is a fun choice. On a turn, a player colors in a rectangle of the given size - it cannot contain any squares that have already been colored in. The last player to have a legal move wins.
You can vary the shape of the original region and the size of the rectangles to use. Another option is to roll two dice for each turn and color in a region whose area is the sum of the two dice. A rectangle size of 2, 3, 5, 7, or 11 allows for only one shape for the rectangle - why is that?
If you have any questions or comments, please send them my way. I would enjoy the opportunity to chat with you. Also, if you are interested in collaborating with us or supporting us in any fashion, I would love to talk with you about ways we can work together.
Chris Wright
January 18, 2022
chris@kitchentablemath.com