Base Ten Block Party

Help Me Get Ranked.

If you have a blog or a website I'm happy to link to you, too.

People always ask if they can pin my pics of base ten blocks. YES.  Just give a link back to where you got the pic.  Kinda like I just did, there.  You click on the words "base ten blocks" and it takes you to Crewton Ramone's House of Math. The 'base ten blocks' part is called the "anchor text" and the "link" (where it goes when you click the anchor text) is 

http://www.crewtonramoneshouseofmath.com 

(a href="http://www.crewtonramoneshouseofmath.com")base ten blocks(/a)
 
Replace the ( ) with <  > and you have the code you need to drop a link into your pages. Those with a little web experience know what I'm talking about. If not just send me an email and we'll figure it out. This will also help me rank with search engines for the term "base ten blocks". Right now I am no where near page one and the pages that are, are not as relevant as my site if I do say so myself. lol  Think back to how you found me in the first place if it wasn't a super excited friend, it was probably you searching for something to do with homeschool math on the internet. This will help others find me too...again people ask how can I help spread the word. This is a good way but things as simple as hitting like or share or mentions in whatever social media you use helps quite a bit. Reall, every little it helps.

You can pull stuff off my website or this blog too if you have a blog or website that needs content, again just give a link back to where you got whatever it was from...to include text. EZ.




JUST PLAY BLOCKS


People also always ask me, what do you mean "just play with base ten blocks?" Just what I said.

This isn't rocket surgery: just play blocks when they are little kids (roughly 8 and under but even teenagers can have fun and learn math just playing with blocks but then it moves to a reward and free time, with the little kids especially 5 and under it's pretty much ALL free time and sing songs ). And DON'T over do it by asking ALL of the questions listed 'at once' or in the same session...they should be "natural" questions. You may also take note of the child or student as they are building; they may say something like, "I need 4 fives...two for each of the smaller ships." For little kids that's 4 divided by 2...and BTW how much is four fives? 5x4.

You could sing songs...whisper count, just skip count...whatever. Keep it simple and fun.

Base ten blocks make math fun.

How many twos on the big ship? Five. Let's count them, 2,4,6,8,10.

Hey how many three's is that on the super duper laser cannon turret? . And what shape is that? Square.

A fast lesson square root should be obvious and natural.

What's 40 plus 40? 80. If you had to use fours how many would you need? 20. Way easier to just grab two 40's huh...?

If you make a cube out of 3's how many units would be in it? 27. Hey look instead of writing 3x3x3 we could write 3³--that's called economy of symbol.


What's 60 plus 60? 120. Wanna get crazy and count 120 by sixes? NO. lol Do it anyway. Lets see if we can find a pattern to make it easier.


You can also see a calc lesson had gone on before this where we learned about doughnut factories and water tanks.

A lesson on square roots of numbers like 2 and 3 can be seen at the nose of the big ship where we wrote out quite a few places. It's all math.

Here was a fun response to build me something.  This is the hull of a pirate ship...with cannons and everything.

Kirk's Tutoring Get's it. You might give his FB page a like.

This came from Kirk's Tutoring, who also uses this method.   I assume the student was given free time but gee, seems a lot of questions could be asked about his too...also note the symmetry and the observations that could be made here, and they could even just start with what the word "symmetry" means. Which is a very complex concept for the 6 and under crowd but there it is shown clearly.

The work here was building a cube of hundreds made out of addends for 10. Then the kid "splendified"  it by adding some hundred squares and the pyramid of multi tens on top.

This is a freighter with huge engines so it can get cargo from planet to planet FAST. 

Here is a building with a monorail going by it.  I thought it was a house with a fence but the little girl who built it set me straight. and she asked for some help flushing up the blocks,  Note the addends for 4 and 9, and of course we counted by sevens, just so she could hear the pattern.  7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49...how many seven is 35? Did you hear THIRTY-TWO...? They should say something like no, but I heard FORTY-Two. Did you hear 15 or 18? No but I did hear 14...etc.

He called Mortensen More Than Math for a reason. Imagination, fine motor skills AND math are developed by playing with these blocks. This page was to give you ideas...NOT BLUEPRINTS.

These need to be turned into little booklets with instructions on how to build them (kinda like those booklets you get with Lego kits) and some observations that can be made while doing so...

The problem I have with doing books like this is that some of you (not all of you) will ONLY build the ones you see in the books ONLY ask the questions I list etc. You have to play and be creative; these are just examples , a vague framework from which you can get ideas and then allow your kids to be creative...and build whatever they want. As they build talk about what they did. Use some symbols to show we can use numbers to "talk" about what they did (express reality numerically). And using mathematical symbols is a WHOLE lot faster than English or whatever language other than mathematics you speak. 

Get  a FREE book to help you get started exploring and discovering the wondrous world of mathematics as presented via base ten blocks.  Just click this link to get Supremely Simple Subtraction delivered directly into your inbox.

Cram Course On Quadratics. P1

Here is a set of videos that covers Quadratics, Triangles and Squares with Pythagoras and a little bit more. Caution advised this is not a normal lesson nor is it the way you should present mathematics to younger students or even students this age, but because we have deadlines to meet I stuffed a lot more into the hour than usual. This might be good for some teachers/parents and students to see where we are going with all this...we seem to lose track of the destination sometimes when we get caught up in computation. This post should answer some WHY questions that may have been lurking out there.

Here is one of the graphs we made while we played around with factoring polynomials...the idea behind it all is problem solving, rational and critical thinking NOT memorizing rules. Note we don't even begin to cover application which means I am still being tricked into teaching backwards.

This is the crash course where we cover many concepts all in one hour. When you are teaching little kids you only cover one concept at a time and add more understanding in layers over time. For example you can spend quite a bit of time just playing and building squares. When they are used to factoring, then we can set it equal to zero and find "roots." What do we mean by roots?



So we start off with a simple one as a refresher and to make it non-threatening...and then we can start graphing and get more information.



Note how the symbols bring up some memories of linear functions for him...and you can see the blending of symbols, blocks, pictures and graphing.



We add more information and math terms like "axis of symmetry." Once we understand that we can add the "vertex", and now with those concepts and the concepts of "roots" we can start adding the "y-intercept" and the other points that make up a five point sketch of functions. YOU may want to take a break and make your own sketch...before watching the next one:



We stayed positive in this lesson and this is more than enough info to absorb for one lesson. Note a crash course with me still contains each rung in the ladder...

Then we change gears and play with triangles, radicals and Pythagoras:



And we also played a bit with fractions and covered the 5 concepts and how they related to everything we just did. You can hear him yawning which tells me we are stressing his attention threshold...good time to quit. No need for drugs or labels like ADD. The lesson went for a solid hour and we covered a lot of ground, MUCH more than you normally would. Stay tuned for more lessons.


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