I’m Thinking of a Number
Choose a number between 1-100 but don’t tell your class what the number is. Now they must ask you questions to determine what the number is. But here is the catch…if they ask you a […]
Mental Math
Happy Waitress, Mad Waitress – Tipping a Waitress With Mental Math
Split your classroom up into teams. Each team will have a restaurant patron and a waitress (or waiter). Give each team a slip showing what they had for dinner and the sum of what they owe. Make these different slips for every team.
Karl’s Sum: Even famous mathematicians don’t always behave!
One day when students in Karl’s class were really noisy and displaying bad classroom behavior, the teacher got very upset. He gave them a problem to solve. He asked them to find the sum of all the counting numbers from 1 to 100: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4…… + 99 + 100 =
Let’s Find the 10s {FREE}
You can do this activity with your students at the board or on worksheets.
Provide them with a really long horizontal sum. Something like this:
3 + 11 + 7 + 5 + 5 + 4 + 9 + 1 + 2 + 13 + 8 =
The idea here is to group pairs of numbers into tens or multiples of ten so that they can quickly and easily find the sum using mental math.
Mental Stretch
Here’s a fun game that you can play with the students in your classroom to get their mental juices going! Begin with a simple whole number like 5. Then start giving the students operations that they should perform in their heads. Use a variety of all four operations and make sure the directions you give will yield whole numbers.
Mental Math Teaching Tips
Mental Math Teaching Tips In daily life, we use mental math for 75% of calculations we perform. Here are some tips for encouraging mental math in your classroom: 1. Practice on a daily basis […]