Arithmetricks

A couple of years ago I did a few fun science mini-camps for my kids and their friends. We did electricity, dinosaurs, and messy science experiments camps. They lasted for about 3 hours and were all hands-on activities. This year I decided to do a couple of camps again, but went with math camps instead. Sarah worked really hard in math this year, but we rarely took time out to play with math. Even though she would have preferred more science camps, I think there will be long reaching benefits when she realizes that math isn't just boring texbooks, but something that can be fun.

I spent a few hours going through a huge stack of math books I've been storing. I found more than enough activities to get us through our 3 mornings. In fact, it was hard to narrow it all down! Here's what we did this morning:

1. Bingo - a good warm-up game. We made it a little more exciting by playing "speed bingo." I read the problems VERY quickly and they had to race to find the answers. No time to compute - they just had to know.
2. Number magic tricks - You know what these are...write a 3 digit number. Use those same digits to write a new three digit number. Find the difference. Total the sum of the digits of the difference. Subtract 5. Your answer - 4, every time!
3. Line designs - These came from a great book called Enrichment Units in Math Book 2. You can see an example on the bottom left corner of the book.

4. Snack -Can't have a group of fourth through sixth graders without a lemonade break!
5. Math Olympics - The kids did a variety of activities like long jump, running, etc. and timed each other and computed their team's average. These activities came from this book:

6. Combinations - Another unit from the Enrichment Units book. We ended the morning by trying to come up with as many of the 242 ways to make a dollar using quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies as we could in 15 minutes.

We took some kind of score for every activity and then declared a winning team at the end. It was so much fun to see this group of homeschooled kids work together on some fun math activities. They encouraged each other and had such a helpful attitude. What a great way to spend a morning!