Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources Making Math Fun

Here are a few ideas.

1. Zome (http://www.zometool.com/)
2. Equate, SET & other math games (http://www.mindwareonline.com) Mindware has a great selection of math games.
3. Math puzzles like sudoku and kakuro. See Mindware for more ideas.
4. Math books (http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/mathematics.htm)- I recommend The Number Devil, but there are many, many other good books on this list.
5. ClueFinders & Zoombinis (http://www.learningcompany.com/jump.jsp?itemType=CATEGORY&itemID=89) - I have found many Cluefinder and Zoombini titles on the discount software sites. My dd9 loves these games and will play them multiple times.
6. Math websites (http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/math.htm) There are great sites listed relating to topics such as tesselations, fractals, Fibonacci numbers, and others that you will not necessarily see in a regular math textbook.
7. Science applications- There are so many science applications, it just depends on your child's interests. My dd loves learning about chemistry. When I have time, I teach her some chemistry basics. She had fun building molecules out of magnetix. Here are a few interesting science websites.
http://www.rsc.org/chemsoc/visualelements//pages/pertable_fla.htm
http://www.chem4kids.com/files/elements/001_speak.html
http://cnse.albany.edu/Nano_for_Kids/nano_games.html

^^Thanks Texas Summer - you are good !

Thanks, Texas Summer. That list looks great. And thanks in particular for the science links. That's what DS loves.

BTW, Questions, we did get Destination math and while it is cartoonish and entertaining, it does seem to move too slow and is repetitive.

Sorry, Neato. Looking back, I think that was the problem with EPGY, too. You have to do all the problems before you can move on. I just saw on homeschool buyers co-op that they have a Destination Math that is tied to the Saxon Math curriculum. Makes me think that they just change the order of what they have and CTY may be a bit different (or more streamlined?). My DS liked it b/c he liked Digit, the colors and the animation. I think we're going to try Singapore so he gets used to writing his answers, and use either HeyMath or Destination Math to supplement/mix it up.

Well I think that's just a fabulous plan! Probably because we will do the same.

I've planned to supplement Singapore with Destination Math. Let's trade notes going forward. I am not pursuing HeyMath, so if you do, please let me know how it is.

Deal!

And keep me in the loop, too, please.

We're having our weird math year, but if it doesn't go well, we'll have to try something else. Singapore Math was not cutting it for him--I think I was taking it too slowly for DS7--so we would probably have to move faster plus do more game-type stuff to keep him interested in the practice that he would need to do so he didn't start hating math again.

Sound familiar?

I found that DS6 gets excited about math when he spends time with a mentor who is passionate about math (i.e., not me). For example, my mathy dad got DS excited about learning binary by teaching him about the Nim game. DS wanted to learn the "secret": http://www.csm.astate.edu/Nim.html.
My math/physics brother played the dot/box game (the one where you draw lines between adjacent dots in an array and try to complete more boxes than your opponent) and got DS interested in coming up with a formula for figuring out how many possible boxes you could make with an XxY array of dots (or something like that - I wasn't excited enough to pay too much attention .

I think there's a real art to teaching math to mathies -- the key is to get them excited enough in a problem so that they *want* to do the grunt work to solve it. I'm sure DS would not be interested in learning binary had it not been for the context of the game. I think the competitive aspect helped too.

I SO agree, Jool! Excitement and love of math really are key, I think.