Math Teachers at Play 34

Welcome to the 34th edition of the Math Teachers at Play Carnival. Since it is new year, we will be talking about cakes, best of 2010, and calendars.

Integers

Maria Miller presents some games that could help elementary school students practice order of operations at Home School Math.

David Ginsburg clarifies some  the misconceptions of using PEMDAS (parenthesis, exponent, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction).  For students, if you are having a hard time working with integers, you should read it.

John Golden contextualizes integers in the Quest for the Holy Snail in his blog Math Hombre.

Erlina Ronda exhibits an intuitive explanation of subtraction of integers in her post “Who says subtraction of integers is difficult?” at Keeping Mathematics Simple.

Mike Dimon provides a method students can use to quickly solve complex multiplication problems involving the number 11 posted at Education for All. His article utilizes an example to illustrate the method and walks through the steps one part at a time.

Fractions and Decimals

Mimi Yang tempts us with food and mathematics in an interesting geometry problem about dividing the cake uniquely and equally at in her blog I hope this old train breaks down.

Robert Talbert has an excellent tip in memorizing the value of e up to 15 decimal places in his blog Counting Out Nines.

Miscellaneous

Denise, the organizer of Math Teachers at Play, gives us a handful of word problems inspired by a colicky baby posted at Let’s Play Math.

Cindy shares many hands-on lessons from pre-kindergarten to grade 5 (with literature connection) best of 2010 posts posted at Love2learn2day.

Guillermo Bautista (that’s me) also presents some of his best 2010 posts.

John D. Cook presents a new math calendar created by Ron Doelfler in his blog The Endeavour.

David Wees exposes the truth that frustrates most educators  in the Fundamental Flaw in Mathematics Education posted at his website. My favorite part:

There is a serious flaw in how this curriculum is constructed. The mathematics that is chosen has no motivation in the minds of the people learning it. If you have wondered why so many people hated mathematics class, it was because they couldn’t see the point of it. That’s because there was no point. People who hate mathematics were learning apparently meaningless algorithms for the sake of the algorithms themselves rather than for the processs in our world where the algorithms describe.

Jaki Braidwood and Mrs. Rogerson shares how their pupils enjoy finding angles inside and outsdide the classroom in An Angling We Go at The Ripple Effect. The kids even created an Animoto presentation about their experience.

Fëanor presents his musings and computations on the likelihood of identical twins both surviving in their 100th birthday in his article The prime twins conjecture posted at Bit-player.

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That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Let’s Play Math Carnival using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

The Math Teachers at Play Blog Carnival is organized by Denise of Let’s Play Math.

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Photo Credit: Radical America by Dan de Chiaro, Twins from BitPlayer.org, Cakes Later on by Debs, Numbers by  lrargerich