Challenge Board #4: Animal Cryptarithms & The Great Wave

Previous Challenge Board: Challenge Board #3: Gardens

Fairy Storyboarding

Two challenge boards ago, fairies appeared in our fairy houses and wrote the kids encoded letters, which the kids then had to decode. Each student then wrote an encoded letter back, and we also built a more permanent house for our little tenants. Now our fairies have written a letter back, and they need the kids' help!

You can read the fairies' letter here, then read my co-conspirator's letter, mentioned in the letter.

In the letter, we learn that the fairies need help finding new fairy passages to Fairy Land, thus the "Storyboarding" challenge. We'll be photographing our fairies looking for the way home and turning it into a storyboard. And until our fairies find the way home, they are stuck using human snail mail to send letters to their friends overseas in Japan, thus the letter challenge and some of the other tie-ins to Japan. 

Of course, even if you don't have fairies visiting your classroom, you can still use these challenges without the "story" behind them. But if you do want an excuse to communicate with, say, a classroom overseas, here is how we're doing it:  My co-conspirator/writer/teacher and I have secretly purchased copies of the same small dragon figurine, so the figurine can appear to travel back and forth, but without the cost of shipping our little guest each time. For Ichigo's big arrival, my husband is going to place the figurine out while we're out of the house. 

Skelley and Buri, the skeletons who sent our fairies a letter, are on Instagram! My co-conspirator's adorable photographs are definitely an inspiration for the fairies and their letters, and I'm using these photographs to help explain storyboarding and inspire my kids.

Animal Cryptarithms

These animal cryptarithms come from Camp Logic: A Week of Logic Games and Activities for Young People (Natural Math) by Mark Saul and Sian Zelbo. Innovative math challenges like this are my other inspiration for the Challenge Boards! I've used pretty much every activity in Camp Logic for my classes in the homeschool community, and now my kids are old enough to tackle some of them themselves.

Example: W + O = O F

For each of these algebra-like problems, one letter equals one single-digit number. Letters next to each other are 2 and 3 digit numbers, so HEN would be a 3 digit number. Problems are not related, so O can equal 5 in one problem and 9 in another problem. Here's a great example of how to solve them using deduction and elimination, and you can google for more cryptarithms.

W + O = O F

Answer: A one-digit number plus a

one-digit number = two digits. The largest possible is 9+9=18, so O =1, but the two numbers you add must be different numbers because they are different letters. The answer is 9+1= 10

P+P+P=I=G+G

Answer: I must be divisible by 2 and by 3, so I=6

HH+HH=OOT 

Answer: OOT must be even because dividing by two gets you HH. Knowing that, try a few double digit numbers for HH, like 11, 22, 33, etc., and see which equal a three digit number. The three digit number must then have two digits the same, and one a different numeral. The answer is: 55=55=110

Good luck!

Paint The Great Wave

We'll be painting waves inspired by Katsushika Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa (Japanese: 神奈川沖浪裏). We'll be following these instructions by deepspacesparkle.com, but I also think paintedpaperart's instructions look good!

To go along with our painting, we'll be reading Hokusai: The Man Who Painted a Mountain by Deborah Kogan Ray. 

We'll also watch Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave by ArtFundUK - Warning: this shows a brief clip of art with a completely bare breast (context is breastfeeding). I love how this video mentions Hokusai's influence on European painters, giving a sense of the time period and the interconnectedness of world history, while still keeping it short. 

Write & Mail a Letter

To go along with our story, I addressed an envelope as if my co-conspirator had sent us a letter, sealed it, and used a letter opener to show that the fairies had opened it. The kids are using the envelope to copy down my friend's address to send a letter back. We've sent her letters before, but this is their first time addressing the envelope themselves.

Read & Present...

For my two youngest, we are looking up the word Ichigo and translating it into languages they are interested in. My oldest is learning hiragana and writing Ichigo (いちご) will be fun practice for us both.

For my two oldest, we're researching why Japan has earthquakes and how an earthquake caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. My oldest was just sharing with me something he learned on his own, about how nuclear power is safer than coal, so this is a natural tie-in for us and a great excuse to look into it further.

Tsunami! by Kimiki Kajikawa

Meltdown! Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima

Ready for the next challenge board?

Challenge Board #5: Owls & Who Dunnits

Challenge Board #3: Gardens

Challenge Board #3: Fairy Gardens

Previous Challenge Board: Challenge Board #2: Fairy Code

Garden Planning Challenge Sheet

Our strawberries are already flowering, and the kids have been helping us plant and transplant lettuce and spinach. Soon it will be time for summer veggies! Before we start on our summer garden, I gave the kids a garden challenge of their own.

Shhh, it's math. My Garden Planning Challenge Worksheet instructs students to use toothpick "fences" and graph paper to learn about area and perimeter, beginning with guided word problems and ending with open-ended challenges. I designed this worksheet to have something for all three kids (7, 9, and 11). You can find it for free at my TPT page. Enjoy!

 

(PS. Jeff is our garden gnome. There is no reference to him on the sheet.)

Easter Crosswords & Word Scrambles

Easter Word Searches (Nonreligious)

Easter Crossword (Religious)

Easter Word Scramble from Crayons & Cravings

April is Poetry Month!

Our favorite poet is Jack Prelutsky, and you can find his work at Poets.org in: Poems Kids Like.

You can also find lesson plans and poems about spring.

My daughter and I are memorizing Los Pollitos Dicen Pio Pio. We've got the first few lines down. Wish us luck!

We're studying Freedom Train by Langston Hughes, a 1947 poem about segregation in America.

Still Life

Here are a couple of videos we used to help us with our still life challenge. My daughter absolutely adores Art for Kids Hub, do I found this for her: Healthy Snack Stack Folding Surprise. 

A lot of the videos I found on my still life search showed kids how to draw from a drawing tutorial, like Art for Kids Hub does. Instead, I wanted a video that encouraged them to arrange a still life and, you know, draw it. So for a bit of art history and an easy demonstration of how to draw a still life, we used: Paul Cezanne Still Life Project.

Challenge Board #4: Animal Cryptarithms & The Great Wave

(Link will work once the post is up)

Challenge Board #2: Fairy Code

For our last Challenge Board, the kids made fairy houses for Saint Patrick's Day. But they made them a little early, and everyone knows that you can only catch a leprechaun on March 17th. But, oh, what's this?! The kids checked the houses early that morning and found new friends, along with the traditional fairy-sized horde of candy.

Tween child attracted a pixie, a being who appreciates camouflage and mischief. He has a dragon hatchling perched on his shoulder.

Middle child attracted a gnome, a being who appreciates good construction and forethought. He is riding a turtle.

Youngest's lean-to attracted a fairy who likes to draw and write, a creative being who knows how to enjoy the capricious winds of life.

How did we learn all this about our new fairy guests? Well, for our next challenge board, the fairies left us coded letters--it seems they're a bit shy and only share their with "kind children and our best fairy friends."

Challenge Board #2: Fairy Code

Coded Message Activity

Encode your own letters here: https://cryptii.com/pipes/alphabetical-substitution

Or print an encoded quote from: https://www.puzzles-to-print.com/cryptograms/index.shtml

We used a simple substitution code and talked about deductions and proof by contradiction. Each message contained predictable or common phrases to help with decoding ("My name is"), and if we had encoded the entire letter, "Dear" and "Sincerely" could also have worked as cues. Each letter also held a seed for what to write back. For example, one letter asked the student to help name a pet dragon.

Tips for printing: 

• Use a font where capital "i" and lowercase L look different, or chose to make them all lowercase.
• Use a large font with double spacing or 2.5 spacing, and increase the space between letters (the kerning). I reprinted mine bigger than shown.
• Leave space on the top or bottom for notes (A=z, etc.)
• If students want to work together, use the same code for each personal message. If they do not, use different codes. I ended up printing a new code for the kid who was determined to solve it himself, so overhearing answers wouldn't throw him.
• Keep a copy of the solutions.

Hints for solving a simple substitution code:

• How many single-letter words are there in the English language? Words with apostrophes? Two-letter words?
• It is okay to guess and wrong. You will be able to tell that you got a letter wrong once you have an impossible word or a phrase that does not make sense.
• The more you solve, the easier it is to solve more by reading what is there and guessing missing words.
• If you have trouble towards the end, check which letters you have solved and try out the ones left.

Encode your return letter by hand:

For beginners, you can write out the alphabet and "slide" the alphabet so that, for example, A becomes B, B becomes C. My own codes were random, and one was the alphabet backwards, so if o=l then l = o as well.

For learning about more complicated codes, we love Codes, Ciphers, and Secret Writing by Martin Gardner. My oldest is planning to encode his using a wheel cipher. Break the Code by Bud Johnson includes codes for students to break to practice their newfound skills.

Suncatchers

Items needed: Clear contact paper, tissue paper in many colors, construction paper, hole punch, yarn, marker, scissors. 

Prep

1. Draw a simple shape on your sheet of paper. Cut it out, leaving an intact paper border. (Don't cut through your border to get to the middle). The paper border helps keep the contact paper from curling.
2. Cut 2 pieces of contact paper to almost the same size as your sheet of paper. They must be bigger than your cutout, but may be easier to place later if they're a little smaller than your paper.
3. Peel off the backing from one contact piece, leaving the contact paper sticky-side up. Place your paper border over your contact paper. The paper border should have a "window" that is now filled by contact paper. Replace the backing over the contact paper until your student is ready to begin.

Art!

1. (Remove the backing.) Students cut strips of colored tissue paper and tear off pieces to fill the "window." You can prep the tissue paper pieces ahead of time for younger children.
2. Once the window is filled and ready, peel the backing off from the second piece of contact paper and lay it sticky-side down, creating a final protective layer.
3. Hole punch and hang with string. You can also cut the string ahead of time, hole punch ahead of time, etc., but I like to let older students chose their string color and do some of this themselves.

 

DIY Word Searches

We used printable graph paper templates for our word searches, using larger squares for our youngest.

Fairy Names

(Shhhh... Our fairy's names are Shay and dragon Shamrock, Jeff and turtle Nina, and Moira)

Challenge Board #3: Fairy Gardens

(Link will work once the next post is live)

 We're starting something new in our homeschool: 

the Challenge Board!

Inspired by innovative math teaching, like this challenge posted on YouCubed, the board includes a wide range of challenges that cover all subjects. Open-ended challenges like "write a story about..." are great for covering the wide range of skills for my 7, 9, and 11yo, and St. Patrick's Day is this month, so it will be fun to include seasonal tie-ins like that. More on the fairy houses later!

Now, let's be real for a minute. Since anything new can be scary, I waited to show them the first board until after they'd already built the fairy houses. It's supposed to be fun, and much of it we would have done anyway. Despite my efforts, one of my three kids immediately had an issue with the board! A few hours later and we're all good now. Growth mindset can be so hard to learn, that it's okay to "fail" to guess the riddle or, apparently, "fail" to write an "epic" story.  Now that all three minds are feeling more open and creative, I am pretty sure we'll end up with three epic stories, haha!

Challenge Board #1: Fairy Houses

We've already erased some of the challenges and replaced them with new ones:

Fairy House & St. Patrick's Day Riddles:

Q: When is your mind like a fairytale?
A: When it's made up!

A: How many sides does a house have?

A: Two. An inside & an outside 

Q: What runs out when you push it?

A: Your luck!

Q: Why can’t you borrow money from a leprechaun?

A: They’re always a little short.

Q: Why do leprechauns hate marathons?

A: They like to jig more than jog.

Q: What do you call leprechauns who collect cans and plastic?

A: Wee-cyclers.

Q: What type of bow can’t a leprechaun tie?

A: A rainbow.

Q: Why do frogs like St. Patrick’s Day?

A: Because they’re always wearing green.

St Patrick's Day Word Searches

This website has different levels of difficulty available, perfect for kids of differing abilities:

https://www.bigactivities.com/word_searches/st_patricks_day/medium/st_patricks_day1.php

You can also find several websites for generating your own wordsearches.

Math Brain Teasers:

 I started the kids off with an easy square brain teaser--too easy, it turned out!

Here are some harder square counting puzzles that are still easier than the classic 4x4 grid with two squares overlaid.

We've also started with some Beginner Balance Benders, like this:

St. Patrick's Day Picture Books:

(You can find a lot of these on youtube read-a-louds)

The Story of the Leprechaun by Katherine Tegen - this book retells the same legend as Clever Tom and the Leprechaun by Linda Shute, which we also love, but this newer version is more sympathetic to the poor leprechaun who's gold Tom/Tim is trying to steal.

Tim O Toole and the Wee Folk by Gerald McDermott - oh, we love Gerald McDermott's folk tale retellings! The wee folk give Tim a goose that lays golden eggs, but when he boats about his good fortune and the goose gets stolen, hijinks ensue.

Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potatoe by Tomie DePaola - another great storyteller who has written folk tales from many cultures. When Jamie catches a leprechaun, he agrees to wish for a magic potato seed instead of the leprechaun's treasure.  

Pete the Cat: The Great Leprechaun Chase by James Dean - this is a very modern story with the message that hard work and helping your friends is better than trying to catch good luck.

How to Catch a Leprechaun by Adam Wallace - this one's great for getting your kids to build leprechaun traps, unless they're my kids, which is why we ended up building fairy houses.

Fairy Houses!

It's fun to see how different each kids' designs are. My youngest built a lean-to with a bed and a pool:

Middle child is a wilderness survivalist and water-proofed the cloth for his house, then corrected me and said it's only water-resistant: 

Oldest focused on camouflage because fae hide from humans:

Hmmmm... I have it on good authority that you can only catch a leprechaun on St. Patrick's day, and we built our houses early. Do you think some other fae might stop by? 😇 (Please, no more tooth fairies!)

I'll be sure to report back!

Challenge Board #2: Fairy Code

Review: Murderous Maths

https://amzn.to/2CKH0CM

Math with the laughs added in – and the boredom taken away. From freaky fractions to cunning codes, you’re in for more laughs than you can count. Beware, brave reader. In Murderous Maths, you won’t find any boring exercises or flummoxing sums. Instead, Professor Fiendish and his rotten sidekick, Chainsaw Charlie, unleash their murderous take on maths. Foul formulas. Agonising algebra. Terrible take-aways. We dare you to try it. Essential curriculum math as you’ve never seen it before Funny approach similar to the Horrible Histories series Now there’s no excuse to be afraid of learning numbers Bestselling series with great cartoons by Philip Reeveon Titles in This Set: The Phantom X Desperate Measures The Perfect Sausage and Other Fundamental Formulas Guaranteed to Bend your Brain Do you Feel Lucky? Awesome Arithmetricks Savage Shapes Guaranteed to Mash your Mind The Key to the Universe Easy Questions, Evil Answers

http://www.murderousmaths.co.uk/

---

Review:

My boys LOVE this set. Because it's published in the UK, some of the terms are different than what we use in the US, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The books are so relatable and funny to my 8 and 10 year old that they have spent the whole summer writing and solving equations in their free time. I would not call this curriculum, and it doesn't claim to be, but that's part of its charm. My kids are reading (and re-reading) these and doing math for its own sake. Concepts are cleverly explained and cover many ideas that help prime elementary students for math learning in future grades. My boys now know and love prime numbers, factorials, and how to calculate to the power of, for example. There's still room for my 10yo to grow with these books!

Caveats: some may find the humor occasionally offensive. I find it creative and feel like that's exactly why my boys love it so much. There are a few other series also published by scholastic that I often see recommended alongside these books (Horrible Histories, Horrible Geography, Horrible Science). Because history is a more religiously polarized subject, I recommend care with reading these books with your young kids.

I gotta say, there's something special about having your kids run up to you showing off math puzzles like this:

Buy Murderous Maths here!

https://amzn.to/2CKH0CM

Egg Hunt: Math and Life Science

Every year we do an Easter egg scavenger hunt. Last year we had a blast doing two for our local homeschool group: Life Science and Math. The students answered questions and then went down the trail to find eggs with labels that matched the answers.

Tip - I find that washi tape works best. We had so many participants that I ran out of washi tape!

It's ten eggs per student, so we ended up preparing a lot of eggs. It was so worth it!

Since it was so successful, I've uploaded the activity to my TPT store for you to print out at home or for your classroom. Math covers up to early multiplication and Life Science includes riddles like "What mammal has wings and uses echolocation to find their food?"

Easter is April 1st this year. Find the STEM Egg Scavenger Hunt on TeachersPayTeachers now to get a head start:
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Plastic-Egg-Scavenger-Hunt-STEM-3121248

And if you're local, contact me to learn about the hunt we run.

Happy hunting!

Fibonacci Sequence Books for Children

If you had asked me a month ago about the fibonacci sequence, I would have said, "I think I've heard of that." I certainly would not have said that I'd be reading fibonacci books to my kids.

Then my husband said he wanted to burn a fibonacci pattern into wood like this using high voltage electricity. The kids have loved learning about Benjamin Franklin and electricity, so I had to admit, that would be cool. We haven't done it yet but if we do I'll be sure to share a photo.

The next day, I saw this book, and I couldn't resist...

What's nice about Growing Patterns is that it's simple and short. You could read a book like this and then go count flower petals and paint pinecones.

Along the same lines, I'm eyeing Wild Fibonacci. The illustrations look beautiful:

And then there's Blockhead for those who like the history and personal side of things. Mine have been enjoying biographies so this was right up that alley:

Another book I'm eyeing is The Rabbit Problem:

This one calls out to me because it presents the basis for understanding animal population growth (decline is another matter entirely!). If your family is interested in ecosystems and how animals fit into them, this looks like a fun way to explore a related concept. It also explains why you won't get your child an unneutered male and female pair of anything. Next thing you know, you'll have a house full of rabbits!


Not enough fibonacci for you? Look! Art inspired by the Fibonacci sequence.

Review: That's a Possibility! by Bruce Goldstone

My 5-year-old is constantly asking me if XYZ can happen. Can a tornado happen where we live? Earthquakes? Can fire burn under water? What if...

The answers often center around probability, and they're questions I don't want to fudge the answer to. What if I told him that tornadoes can't happen here, and then we have to hide in our bathroom from a tornado? That would be my luck! And just try telling him "not to worry" about something. He's not too worried, actually. He likes his what-ifs and can-you-reallys. So, yes, a tornado can happen here, but it doesn't happen often.

Yes, we had a small earthquake here once (can't fudge that one!) but no, earthquakes are unlikely to destroy everything on the continent. These "buts" and "maybes" would eventually lead to him asking me the exact same question again (Send help!), perhaps looking for a more accessible answer.

Then I found this book. Tada! It walks the reader through questions and visuals like the one on the cover and introduces important terminology such as "possible" and "probable." It starts out at about my 5-year-old's level and gets a little more complicated from there, ending with a few activities you can do at home.

This book brought the concept of probability back down from the clouds, where my child lives, down to earth. At least for a few minutes.

I'm sure my 5-year-old will continue to ask (and re-ask...) the same kinds of questions every hour of every day, but now the answers and the discussions that follow can be more meaningful to him (and to me.) Now he understands that there are many things that CAN happen but likely never will happen. Like being struck by lightning. One hundred times. Yes, of course he asked me that one, too.

Get That's a Possibility here!

P.S. Fire can burn under water if it is burning magnesium. Or if it uses an oxidizer. You're welcome.

Fun with Fractions! #Math #Homeschool

My son has been interested in fractions, so I printed out this fraction bar freebie on Teacher's Notebook and TPT, broke out fun manipulatives and our calculator.

Once it came time for review, we enjoyed:

Match It! Fractions Puzzle Cards

and Pizza Fraction Bingo. He really loves Bingo and other board games, so we have several bingo games by this company. Learning Resources also has a number of other matching fraction manipulates (see below), but if you prefer solid wood, especially for little hands, get something like Grimm's Wooden Fraction Circles:

.

or this Lift and Learn Puzzle which also has the words and numbers on it. I love the nice colors, solid feel, and the food-neutral aspect of these alternatives.

There is also plenty of organic learning that you can do with fractions. I started describing their food in fractions long before we with printables and manipulatives. Cooking is a great way to learn and review fractions over and over again. You can have lots of fun baking or pouring water from one measuring cup into another.

More Learning Resources fraction manipulatives:

Pizza Fraction Fun - Pizza Fraction Magnets

Rainbow Fraction Circles - Fraction Tiles (Rectangles)

Have something cool to add? Comment below!