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Celebrate Math Awareness Month with Education World's third volume of "Math Fun" lessons. These five activities can be used to reinforce a variety of math skills. Included: Activities that teach critical thinking, math facts and computation, decimals, more.

April is Math Awareness Month. To celebrate, why not set aside some time during math class to have some fun? Choose one day a week to play math games that provide real life math practice. Or try out a new fun activity each week. By the end of the month, you'll have a handful of activities to fall back on. (And won't you be surprised when your students play those math games in their spare time -- just because they're fun!)

Another way to celebrate "Math Month" is to simply introduce into your classroom routine a fun "invisible math" activity that students can do in their spare time. For example...

Concentrate!
For many students, memory skills are an important companion to math skills. Memory games help students exercise their brains too. Challenge and develop students' memory skills with two fun versions of the Concentration game at Coolmath4kids. Have students keep track of the fastest times in which they complete Concentration Puzzle 1 or Concentration Puzzle 2 and then award prizes for the fastest times and most improved times each month! (Classmates can verify one another's final times by initialing their charts.)

Now, let's turn out attention to...

FIVE MORE "MATH FUN" LESSONS

This week, Education World provides five lessons for math fun. Click each of the five lesson headlines below for a complete teaching resource. (Appropriate grade levels for each lesson appear in parentheses.)

Homerun Math
Students advance the bases as they correctly answer math questions. (Grade K-12)

High, Low, or in Between?
This card game involves predicting and probability. (Grade K-8)

"Weighing the Elephant"
A math problem presented in a Chinese folktale exercises thinking skills. (Grades K-12)

Decimal Bingo
This BINGO game reinforces computation with decimals, but can be adapted to other math skills. (Grades 3-5)

Math "Hoop-la"
Real-life math! Students figure the mean, median, and mode of basketball free-throw data. (Grades 3-8)

Article by Gary Hopkins
Education World®
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