At Home Astronomy

There are 10 activities at At Home Astronomy that you can do at home (naturally!), from learning about the order of the planets in our solar system to building a lunar settlement and finding out where the sun is and even calculating how big it is.

The site is made possible by the Center for Science Education at Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley, and exists to provide families with instructions for hands-on science experiments.

Each project has links for further research and more details. In the case of the astrolabe for instance (that's a device used for measuring altitude, including the height of objects in the sky), you not only learn how to build and use it, but you also get links to Encyclopedia Britannica for the history behind the device and to a page called astrolabes.org which provides an overview of astrolabe principles.

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Geometry Homework -- Reflection and Symmetry

A reflection isn't just what looks back at you in the mirror in the morning. Reflections are also mathematical problems to be drawn, groaned over, erased and drawn again.

Back to MathIsFun.com for geometry help, where they give two underlying principles of reflections:

1. Every point is the same distance from the central line;

2. The reflection is the same size as the original image.

There's also a definition to work with: a reflection is the image flipped over the mirror (or center) line.

If all that is clear as mud, go on and play around with the shapes on their interactive graph, then scroll down for explanations and tricks.

There's also a wonderful tutorial on Line Symmetry at LinksLearning.org that's sure to help clear up concepts behind lines of symmetry (a snowflake has 6!). After the explanations are given in each part, there's an activity to see if you understand what you've watched before you progress.

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Do You Know Your Triangles?

Which triangle has NO equal sides or angles: the isosceles triangle; the equilateral triangle or the scalene triangle? If you don't know, don't feel bad. No one does--except the people at MathIsFun.com of course.

At MathIsFun, you'll learn (or refresh your failing memory!) that the triangle with 3 equal sides and angles is the equilateral triangle, the one with two equal sides and angles is the hard-to-spell isosceles and the triangle with NO equal sides or angles is called a scalene.

There's more too -- it seems that triangle names can actually indicate what type of angle is inside (who knew?) and that some triangles have two names! Curiouser and curiouser...

OK, that's it for today's Sunday night homework.

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Mom, what'a a perimeter?

Need a little refresher? Think of a fence or even a border when you need to explain what a perimeter is. Talking about it in those terms might be easier to understand than saying that a perimeter is the boundary line or the area immediately inside the boundary or defining it as a circumference.

Then go to Mrs. Glosser's Math Goodies to get diagrammed examples of how to find perimeters for all sorts of different shapes, complete with commonly used formulas. Scroll down the page, and you'll find exercises to try.

Here's one: can you find the perimeter of a triangle with sides measuring 10 inches, 14 inches and 15 inches? Type your answer in the Answer Box on Mrs. Glosser's Math Goodies page and press ENTER.

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Monster Mind Reader - Fun With 2 Digits

I revisited a favorite site of mine, CoolMath.com, and got a little weirded out by the cute little Mind Reader. Why? Cuz he's right every time!

I've seen it before (think of a 2 digit number; subtract the sum of the two digits from the original number, and your answer appears on the screen), but I've never really understood how it's done. I guess magic is the only explanation available to me.

Now I'm off to study the geometry of crop circles. And no, I don't think magic is at work here. Little green men seems perfectly reasonable.

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Homework Helper - The MIssissippi River

My Grade 6 daughter is writing a report on the Mississippi River, and I'm surprised at how difficult it is to come up age-appropriate fact sheets. I've been doing some digging and am putting links to those that I think kids can most easily use below:

From Kent ICT (which will be moving to www.kenttrustweb.org.uk?kentict in December 2009), there's a comprehensive fact page which talks about transport and agriculture;

From Byrant University, there's a page that contains a brief section on animal life in the Mississippi;

From The Center for Global Environmental Education, there's a page that talks about the use of the river:

Millions of people each year use the Mississippi River for recreation, but the Mississippi is, and always has been a working river. An average of 175 million tons of freight are shipped each year on the Upper Mississippi.

From Hucks.com, there's Mississippi River Facts, which can be very helpful when explanations are needed for specifics of river life (for example: locks act like elevators to raise or lower your boat from the water level on one side of the dam to the level on the other side; and each individual barge holds 1500 tons, the equivalent of 15 railroad cars or 58 semi trailers.





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More on Math and Multiplication

Math bingo is a fun method of reviewing times tables.

All you need is bingo cards that have numbers on them (the numbers of course being the correct answers to the times table you're working on), then call out the calculations that make up those number.

For example, let's say you're working on your 9 times table. You call out 9 times 7; your kids need to figure out the answer and see if that number (63) is on their card.

Having trouble with the 9 times? Use the 9-method!

Let's say you want to see how much 9X7 is.

Just hold out all 10 fingers, and lower the 7th finger. There are 6 fingers to the left and 3 fingers on the right.

The answer is 63!

Go ahead: practice building your speed with Underwater Times Tables, at a great site called What2Learn.com.

For more suggestions on how to help kids (Grades 2 - 6) memorize their times tables, see this page.

Okay, now who can tell me what 8 X 9 is? Come on!

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New Online Virtual World for Kids

Based on the books by John Bittleston, The Travels of Wiglington and Wenks, an online virtual world for kids aged 7 to 14, is due to launch in the Christmas of 2009. I've signed up for the notification of its launch, and will try it on for size.

If reality lives up to the hype, it sounds good. The site says "parents can look forward to an educational and safe site for their children where they will be learning about history, geography, landmarks, famous people, inventions, animals and more. And for the children, they can expect hours of exploration fun."

Kids will be able to:

• travel to factual and mysterious places around the world
• travel through time and space
• meet famous people from the past
• play dozens of enriching and fun games
• make new friends and party with them
• buy exotic islands
• build culture-inspired houses
• wear clothes from different countries
• explore secret locations
• solve mysteries and puzzles

I've never read the books, so that's another thing to explore.

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Long Division

Long division (called the algorithmic process) is the next on my list -- I mean, my kid's list -- to learn.

The standard approach to solving long division is broken down into five steps:

1. Divide
2. Multiply
3. Subtract
4. Bring Down
5. Repeat (if necessary)

In case you need a bit of a refresher, here are a few sites that explain and illustrate the process:

• the Long Division page at Math is Fun

• the Long Division page at AAA Math

• the Long Division lesson at Cool Math 4 Kids (you can test your skills at their Number Monster page)

DoubleDivision.org is a site that introduces a different method of doing long division and has an easy-to-understand calculator that works the problem through with you step by step. Instead of five steps, double division has three:

Step 1 - Double, double, double.
Step 2 - Subtract off multiples.
Step 3 - Add up your answer.

The benefit of this system over the five-step system is said to be that

double division does not depend on memorizing the multiplication facts or estimating how many times one number goes into another. It may take 50% longer, but it is far less frustrating and probably easier to understand than long division.

Whatever works works for me!




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Spelling It Right

Maybe good spelling doesn't seem to be all that exciting or fun, but sometimes that's because too much guessing goes on.

Unlike spelling, math is an exact science: you learn the rules and apply them, you get the right answer. This makes it more like a game or competition. (Review multiplication tables by bingo and you non-believers will see how math can become fun).

When kids have to guess at spelling, they don't "win" when they get something right. They just get lucky--there's no "building blocks" going on. English teacher, Roger Smith, thinks that educated guesses are a step in the right direction.

For example, at his site Spelling It Right: Learn How to Spell Confidently, he gives weak spellers a fighting chance when it comes to spelling words with iffy vowels.

When you say words like "relative" or "information", the middle vowels aren't clearly stressed which can make spelling those words correctly a bit tricky. Mr. Smith has a trick up his sleeve that can help: think of another word from the same root, and maybe you can figure it out.

With "relative", he shows the word "relation".

With "information", he shows the word "inform".

Once he's shown you how, he gives you an exercise to complete:

Here's the root word: define. Complete this word: def_nition
Here's the root word: sedate. Complete this word: sed_tive
Heres' the root word: explore. Complete this word: expl_ration

and so on.

It's not just how to spell difficult or tricky vowel sounds -- the free worksheets cover syllables, consonant blends, prefixes, suffixes and word endings. Mr. Smith even goes into subject-specific words taken from science, geography and maths where he shows how the word is spelled and what the difficult bits might be.

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