Developing Math Minds

Measurement

• What is the difference between the sizes of drinking glasses, plates and bowls in the kitchen. Estimate and measure their size.

• Observe and talk about customary and metric measurements on food labels.

• Practice measuring with water or flour using measuring cups and a kitchen scale. Convert between the two measurement scales.

• Discuss temperature and the time it takes to freeze or boil something.

• Wonder and measure the size of trees, the home or how long the street can be.

• Measure rugs and windows and beds. Find the area of each.

• Speed on a street or highway.

• Unit rates in a grocery store.

• Distance to a place they want to go.

Talk about simple everyday measurements to develop a real world sense of size.

Decimals

• Add random coin values by writing the values in decimal form. .01 .05 .50 etc.

• Round prices to ones or tens in stores.

• Measure yourself and your student in centimeters and convert it to meters.

• Show children receipts from food stores and restaurants.

• Quiz children on conversion between fractions and decimals.

• Ask children to wonder why some stores use .99 and some use .87 after the whole number.

• Discuss star ratings and how a place got a score like 4.3 or 2.5.

Integers and Coordinate Planes

• Talk about owing money and relate it to negative numbers.

• Ask children to give numbers to the Lobby Level, Lower Lobby Level, or Parking Levels when taking an elevator or stairs.

• Use pool time or beach days to talk about integers.

• Use mall or neighborhood maps to talk about directions.

• Chart grades or their growth. Ask their pediatrician to show the child their growth chart.

Patterns and Measure of Center

• Find patterns everywhere! Leaves on trees or flowers on a plant. Wallpaper, people wearing a certain color in church. Kids with the same name in different grades.

• While sitting at a red light, count how many cars make it through each day.

• How many days does it take to get to the end of a gallon of milk.

• Count the color groups in a package of Skittles or M&Ms. Count them each time.

• How many different outfits can you make from 7 clothing articles?

• Find the mean, median and mode of the monthly grocery spending, grades, gas fill-up.

• Find the measure of center on anything your child is interested in, i.e. basketball points per games, batting average, gymnastic scores.