Teachers and parents, are you looking for a fun and different math activity for your students or kids? Then you’ll be happy to learn that tomorrow, March 3rd 2010, is World Math(s) Day!
Teachers can sign their classes up to participate in this online math contest with same-aged students (5-18 years) from around the globe for a chance to win prizes. Individual students or homeschooling families can register too. This year for the first time there is even a category for teachers and parents who want to join in the fun. Plus, it is all COMPLETELY FREE!
Here is how it works:
“Students play at home and at school against other students around the world in live games of mental arithmetic. Each game lasts for 60 seconds and students can play up to 500 games, earning points for each correct answer. The students who answer the most questions appear in the Hall of Fame. Students cannot select their level but will move up as they progress.”
So far there are over 2 million students from 37,000 schools in 200 countries registered for tomorrow’s event. The goal is to beat last year’s world record of correctly answering 452,681,681 questions!
I had fun just browsing the lists of students and classes registered from an amazing array of locations. It would make for a great geography lesson in addition to the math fun!
They hung a sign on the school door asking for donations of books and baked goods for our Haiti fundraiser.
They placed an empty box in the school entryway for collecting the books.
They also put a sealed box in the lobby for any impromptu donations.
Day before, set-up:
The day before the sale they accepted baked goods.
After school they sorted the books into children and adult piles.
They organized the children’s books into separate boxes and baskets based on level (picture books, readers, chapter books).
Everything was set up on tables in our tiny school entryway with a simple pricing system posted.
The Sale:
The morning of the sale, they set up the baked goods outside the door on a table (it was so cold and snowy that there was no danger of spoilage!).
The school is on a side street, so they put out a sign on the main road nearby. They also put signs in the grocery store and the library. All signs said clearly that proceeds would be for Haiti.
The sealed box went to a prominent location on the book table, with a basket nearby with a few small bills and coins for making change.
They hung a Haitian flag and also posted some information about Partners in Health so any interested people could read more about where their money would be going.
Post-Sale:
I helped them sort through the leftover books and we separated the ones that were fairly recent and looked pretty new.
We took these “good” leftovers to our local bookstore so the owner could buy any that would work for her used book section. She ended up buying almost all of them, and even gave us more than her normal cash price since we were doing this for Haiti! (Be sure to let a bookstore know that you are selling for Haiti)
The kids packed up the other books and we put them in storage for our annual school yard sale.
Counting:
Practical math lesson: The children counted the cash and were SO excited, especially when they found a $100 bill in the box!
Their teacher counted the checks for privacy reasons (NOTE: For ease of accounting, we made sure people made their checks out directly to Partners in Health and not to our school).
I took the cash to the bank and traded it in for a cashiers check made out to Partners in Health.
And voilà! Not a whole lot of effort really, but now we have a nice donation to send off to Partners in Health and the kids feel GREAT!
Today we sit stranded at home after a week of snow days and over four feet of snow! The hungry birds hop busily about the bird feeders trying to fuel up before a cold night’s sleep. It seems a good day to write that post about edible ornaments for the wild birds.
As I mentioned not long ago, every Christmas Eve the kids and I sit down and make edible tree decorations to hang on our trees outside as gifts to our wild birds. We call it our Bird Christmas, but you could have fun making these at any time of year. The squirrels often make off with many of our treats, but I don’t mind!
(By the way, although wire and dental floss are easy, if I can, I like to use natural cotton yarn or string for hanging since this is recycled by birds in the spring for cozy nests!)
Classic Pinecone Feeders: Send the children out to collect pinecones. The bigger and more open, the better. Mix peanut butter and bird seed together in a bowl. Tie string or yarn around the pinecones to use for hanging (I find that it is a bit less messy to do this step before covering the pinecones in peanut butter). Roll the pinecones in the mixture using a spoon to push it down between the scales if necessary.
VARIATION:
No pinecones where you live? Then use bagels! Spread with peanut butter, sprinkle on birdseed, and the hole makes them really easy to hang.
Orange Cup Feeders: An adult should prepare the cups. Cut oranges in half and scoop out the insides to set aside for a healthy snack or a fruit salad (a grapefruit knife makes this job easy). Use a metal skewer, knitting needle, or large darning needle to poke three approximately equidistant holes around the edge of the orange cup, near the top. Thread string or yarn through the holes forming a hanger made of three strings. Now for the kid part: Fill the cups with a peanut butter/birdseed mixture.
VARIATIONS:
Fill with softened suet and birdseed, although peanut butter is more kid-friendly. Suet is a great alternative for kids with peanut allergies though.
If you have orioles in your area, fill the cups with grape jelly. Orioles like jelly and they are attracted to the color orange!
Easiest option – Don’t hollow out the oranges and just hang orange halves as is. Orioles, robins, mockingbirds, tanagers, grosbeaks and cardinals like the fruit.
“Bird Tinsel”: Decorate shrubs and trees with strings of cranberries and popcorn (no salt or butter). Thread the treats using a large needle and string, heavy duty thread, or dental floss. Our popcorn didn’t string so well this year for some reason (perhaps our needle was not sharp enough) so we ended up just doing cranberries. Use frozen or fresh berries. I prefer frozen. Frozen are less messy to string and thaw quickly once threaded.
VARIATIONS:
Try dried fruits such as cherries, craisins, blueberries, papaya, apples or apricots. How about peanuts in the shell?
String fresh orange slices.
Try other fresh berries such as strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, or rasberries.
Raisins come in many colors and sizes. Experiment with different varieties to make pretty patterns.
FUN TIP: When threading a variety of foods, have your children create repeating patterns. The garlands will be pretty to look at and your children will exercise their art and reasoning skills!
Bird “Cookie” Ornaments: You can use cookie cutters to make shaped ornaments for your wild birds. The easiest variety are made with stale bread (although fresh is fine too, but might be harder to cut). Use a cookie cutter to cut shapes out of the bread. Poke a hole near the top using a skewer or straw. String yarn, string, dental floss or wire through to make a hanger. I have even hung these using a wire Christmas ornament hanger poked directly through the bread. Very easy.
VARIATIONS:
If you want to get fancy, you can decorate your “cookies” with peanut butter and sprinkle on birdseed designs. The seed will stick to the peanut butter and you’ll have instant “fancy” ornaments that the birds will love!
For those with peanut allergies, or for a change, brush the bread shapes with egg white. Sprinkle with bird seeds and bake on a baking sheet at 300 degrees for about 5 minutes (this will cause the seeds to stick to the bread).
Melt suet, mix with birdseed and pour into greased, shaped molds (or lined muffin tins). Put in freezer to harden, or outside if it is very cold. Use a skewer to poke a hole through when they are getting solid but not yet truly hard. Remove from molds when frozen and hang outside. (NOTE: You can use commercially available rendered suet, get some from the butcher, or make your own suet mix from a recipe in the links below. Be careful of vegetable based fats, they are not supposed to be as healthy for birds. Also, ordinary animal fats can spoil and melt easily if the temperature is not cold enough. Think – greasy mess on your deck and birds with indigestion. More on all these issues here: The Great Crisco Debate).
Try wiping your bread ornament in bacon grease. I once read somewhere that Blue Jays and squirrels love this. Perhaps a good way of recycling sink-clogging bacon grease? The bread plus bacon grease would probably work a lot better in summer than straight bacon grease which melts very easily. Also, since bacon grease is salty, it is advisable only in moderation and when a fresh supply of water is available nearby. I have a heated bird bath that is hugely popular with my birds in winter, since it provides fresh water when all other sources are frozen.
Bird Goody Bags: Save your nylon mesh produce bags (the kind fruit, tomatoes, or onions come in). Stuff them with suet, seeds and dried fruit. You could even put in shelled peanuts or other nuts, unsalted is best. Make sure they can fit through the holes – crush them if necessary. Hang outside. You can decorate these with fancy bows if you want them to look festive.
This week’s post is a change from other Unplugged Project posts. The theme for this week’s Unplugged Project was change. We did lots of things this week that involve change, but no real sit down and do it kind of “project.” None of these projects were planned around the theme, they just happened.
Change the world: On Thursday I took my oldest daughter and a few other children from her class to our local soup kitchen to help serve lunch and clean tables. I am leading a community service workshop for our small Montessori school’s elementary class (6 to 9 year-olds). If we want to change the world, we must start with the children. More on this project later.
Small change (can change the world): Of their own initiative, my oldest daughter and two friends have formed a secret club called The Helping Hands Club (The HHC for those in the know!). On Saturday they sold homemade chocolate chip cookies that they made (by themselves) and pumpkins (that they bought with their own money) to a few neighbors and made $21+ in small change for charity! (Reminded me a bit of the great Heifer International Christmas ornament sale a few years ago.)
Change of seasons: It is fall in our part of the world and we walked together on this glorious fall day. The sky was blue, the fall colors vibrant, the air crisp yet comfortable. A fire is crackling in the fireplace now as I write this.
Changing the worm bin: Yes, the worms in our worm bin are still happily eating, reproducing, and pooping. It was time to change the bedding and harvest the castings, so we did it today. The kids love interacting with the worms. We are trying a new harvesting method this time, more on that later if it works.
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If you did a changeUnplugged Project, then please link to your POST not just your blog in the Linky below. If you did not join in, then do not link, but you can always read more here about how to participate in the Unplugged Project. We’d love to have you!
The theme for this week’s Unplugged Project was wheel. I searched around for ideas and came up with this one which sounded really interesting: a zoetrope!
What is a zoetrope you ask? (I didn’t know what it was either.) A zoetrope works on the same principle as a flipbook, one of those little books where you flip the pages and it looks like an image is moving, but it uses a rotating cylinder to produce the illusion of movement.
I like this definition from Wikipedia: “A zoetrope is a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures.” The word zoetrope comes from the Greek zoe (life) and trope (turn), so it is really a “wheel of life,” perfect for our theme!
Then I found a totally ingenious person who made one out of a salad spinner! Why didn’t I think of that? We absolutely had to try it and the result was AWESOME! It is an easy project that produces a maximum “wow factor.” Try it, here’s how:
Use electrical tape to tape off the slits on the salad spinner basket leaving every third slit open. We used 3/4″ electrical tape and that just happened to be exactly the right size for the job.
For images, the salad spinner genius used cutouts of the phases of the moon from a calendar. Very clever but I decided to draw my own pictures.
On a piece of white paper I marked off a series of 3/4″ x 3/4″ squares.
Then, using a black Sharpie, I drew a face with a changing mouth and waving hair, making each image slightly different than the previous one.
The tedious part was cutting out all 26 images and taping them in sequence to the blocked off areas of the inside of the salad spinner.
Finally, using a clump of rolled up tape, stick your zoetrope onto the overturned lid of the salad spinner, centering it as best you can. The zoetrope will be sitting on the rotating disk, and the salad spinner handle will be underneath.
Now for the fun: spin and look through the slots to see the “movie!” The view is best if you shine a bright light into the bowl of the zoetrope.
Hopefully you’ll see from this little 10 second video that we made, how cool this project really was!
Let’s not forget THE SCIENCE:
So how do flipbooks, zoetropes, thaumatropes (a rotating card with a different picture on each side, the pictures appear to combine when card is spun), cartoons, and old time film movies actually work? Many people still believe in the “persistence of vision” theory, in which it is thought that an image remains in the eye for a certain time after the image source is actually gone (ie. the optic nerve is the cause). Apparently that theory is no longer in favor these days. A more popular theory at the moment involves something called Beta movement where the brain itself apparently combines rapidly flashing images thus forming a perception of movement (ie. the brain is the cause). It seems that no one really understands any of this completely, but here are a few informative links if you are interested:
I am "Mom Unplugged," mother of three children ages 9, 7, and 4 (and way too many pets). I invite you to read more about me and my blog here. Thanks for stopping by!
Comments (6) 
that is hugely popular with my birds in winter, since it provides fresh water when all other sources are frozen.
Themocracy