Offline Ideas:

(courtesy of Rebekaah Stenner, MPSD Math Mentor Teacher)

• Record the daily weather – sunny, rainy, cloudy – using tallies, and make a bar graph at the end of each month.
• Take pictures of and talk about interesting number patterns, clocks, math in nature.
• Measure how tall you are at the beginning of the month using string or something similar and measure again at the end of the month. Did you grow?
• Count things in your yard: pine cones, trees, rocks, sticks (if there are too many, making groups of 5 or 10 first makes counting easier, and is also good skip-counting practice).
• Count the flowers growing in your front and back yards. Which one has more/less? How many flowers are there in all? (Courtesy of Ann George through the MPSD Joyful Literacy initiative.)
• Estimate and then count how many steps and/or how long it takes to walk to different places in your home, across the yard, around the house, etc.
• Draw or write patterns outside with chalk with some items missing and try to find the missing ones. For example, circle, square, circle, square, ______, square; OR, 7, 6, 5, ____, 3, 2, 1.
• Try to figure out how many breaths we take in a day.
• Try to figure out how many days there are until Easter.
• Look for number patterns in calendars.
• Talk about the days of the week, the months of the year, the seasons.
• Talk about the different coins, what they are worth, and how to count them.
• Play Go Fish, but instead of trying to get pairs, the goal is to try to get cards that add to 10, so 3 and 7 or 2 and 8 (all cards above 9 get removed from the deck).
• Count your socks. How many do you have? How many pairs do you have?
• Decide how many noodles to cook for spaghetti for the family.
• Guess how many cups of water you will need to fill different sized buckets.
• Practice doubles by using familiar visuals like egg cartons for 6 + 6 = 12, cupcake pans for 3 + 3 = 6, weeks in the calendar for 7 + 7 = 14, crayon boxes for 8 + 8 = 16, fingers and toes for 5 + 5 and 10 + 10
• How many minutes of ads compared to actual programming time there are on different TV shows.
• Show how numbers can be broken into two parts; for example, 5 goldfish crackers could be split as 0 and 5, 1 and 4, etc.
• How much dirt do we need if we want to plant a garden?

Online Resources:

Math in Mission For Families:

Math mentor teachers Rebekaah Stenner and Camille Anderson will be sharing engaging ideas and activities.

Mathcatcher: Mathematics through Indigenous Storytelling: 

“To promote mathematics among Indigenous learners, we have created a series of stories with mathematical themes. These stories are based on the storytelling tradition of Aboriginal peoples. The fact that all of our stories have been translated into several Indigenous languages is probably the biggest recognition that an author could hope for.  Take a moment to scroll down through this page and click on each of the stories….you will see and hear many different translations of each story.”

Math For Love: Games, Lessons and Activities to build a love of math!

• For parents & kids
• For teachers