Tag Archives: 3rd grade

Discovering the area of a trapezoid

Posted on December 29, 2017 by aofradkin

Below is a guest post by Dmitry Bryazgin (originally written in Russian). Dmitry runs a small math circle near Princeton for students in grades 3-5. On the particular day described in the post, there were 4 students present. The main … Continue reading →

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Logical Fun, Part II

Posted on May 13, 2017 by aofradkin

Here is the long overdue follow-up post to Logical Fun, Part I. The previous post left off with the following logic problem being posed to the students: A man is looking at a portrait.  A passerby asks him whose picture … Continue reading →

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Logical Fun, Part I

Posted on April 25, 2017 by aofradkin

Once a week, I teach a joint math class at my school which combines children of ages 6-10.  For these lessons, I generally try to pick an activity that I can present as a series of “problems” of increasing difficulty … Continue reading →

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Fibonacci Trees

Posted on March 22, 2017 by aofradkin

For two weeks in a row, in our joint 1st-5th grade math classes, a certain famous sequence made its appearance.  The activities were seemingly very different: in the first one we were climbing stairs one or two steps at a … Continue reading →

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Four colors or more?

Posted on March 10, 2017 by aofradkin

When you find your students working during break time on a problem that was the topic of a lesson three weeks prior, you know that something has gone right and your heart is filled with joy and excitement. What they … Continue reading →

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Dots in a Square from Math Without Words

Posted on February 10, 2017 by aofradkin

Recently, my third grade class and I have fallen in love with Math Without Words by James Tanton. This is a delightful collection of math puzzles, ranging in difficulty from fairly easy to quite hard, but all mathematically beautiful. Occasionally, … Continue reading →

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I come before you!

Posted on November 15, 2016 by aofradkin

Today I had two really fun lessons on the same topic, one with the kindergartners and the second one with the 2nd and 3rd graders combined.  The topic was “when does order matter?” and I began both classes with a … Continue reading →

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Exploring Rectangles

Posted on September 17, 2016 by aofradkin

Friday is a special day in our math classes at the Main Line Classical Academy.  We read and discuss mathematical stories and we do exploration projects.  Here is the project that we did with the 2nd-4th grades last Friday. It … Continue reading →

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