Len's Gems: Math(s) for when you are stuck at home

Youcubed is a great place to find activities to do at home. Teachers you should consider joining YouCubed as it has a wealth of information that could be beneficial for your teaching and students. (Free to join and regular emails to your inbox)

Forward

Hello youcubians,

We know this is a trying time for everyone, so we’re doing our little piece to help out teachers and families with kids at home. Below is a set of activities from our site with modifications to make them work better from home, making continuing to learn maths while maintaining social distancing easier.

This time around we are sharing some of our favorite activities from our site, but soon we will start sending out new home-specific ideas, as well as short videos to go along with the activities. All of this will be archived on a page on our site that we are currently building for this purpose. We wanted to send you some of our favorites to get started, but keep an eye out because much more is to come!

Please share your students' work using the hashtag #YoucubedAtHome and check the hashtag out to see others' work and interact with them! You can also use it to tell us what you'd like to see in future newsletters. We're here to help everyone get through this together!

We have organized the activities by the kinds of resources needed to explore them. Some only require household supplies, others might need to be printed or use other technology or some more specific supplies, some are outdoor activities, and some are activities for students to engage in with their families.

Household supplies only:

Snap-it (K-2): In this activity, students use snap cubes to make sense of parts and wholes and relate that to addition and subtraction of pairs. A small handful of anything you have on hand: pennies, paper clips, etc. will work just as well as snap cubes.
Fewest squares (3-12): Students draw an 11x13 grid and try to find the fewest number of squares they can use to cover it without overlap or extending outside the grid. Our students have worked this question for hours at a time!

Indoor with technology / other supplies:

Number visuals (K-12): In this activity students color-code collections of circles as they look for patterns. They can do this directly on a tablet, or you can print them out for the whole family, pull out some crayons, and use them as dinner mats. (K) : (1-2) : (3-5) : (6-12)
Poly-Up (5-12): Poly-Up is an online platform that pushes students to develop computational thinking skills while helping Poly fix machines.

Outdoors:

Mathematical Art (K-12): We encourage students to expand this activity and discuss the maths you see in public art AND ANYWHERE! (Really anywhere! nature, architecture, street signs, etc.) Are there interesting shapes? Angles? Patterns? There is so much to see out there!

Family activities:

Feet under the table (K-2): While sitting around the table, ask your student to figure out how many feet are under the table without looking. If your child is up for a challenge have them figure out how many toes are under the table.
Emoji Graph (K-12): Students can survey their family on a topic of their choice and make a graph describing their findings. (K-2) : (3-5) : (6-8) : (9-12)

Cheers and good health,
Youcubed Content Team