Sunday, September 10, 2017

Programming Ideas

A major part of my job as a Youth Services Library Assistant is to develop and present programming for kids from BABY to TEENS.  My expertise is with kids from about 8 and up.... I'll leave the ideas for little guys for the little-guys-experts/

There are a zillion ideas bumping around in my head, each one pretty much ignited by reading a  picture book, and I'm going to start with MATH.

MATH

The Fibonacci Sequence
Book:  The Rabbit Problem by Emily GRavett

Graphing
Book:  Lines, Bars and Circles: How William Playfair Invented Graphs by Helaine Becker
Activity Ideas:  Make a Bar Graph using M & Ms, Skittles, Froot Loops, or something similar.  If it's nice outside, kids could take their completed graphs and, using chalk, draw them on the sidewalk.

Infinity
Book:      Infinity and Me by Kate Hosford
Activity Ideas:  Create Infinity Tiles based on this Babble Dabble Do activity.
     Also "Endless Tiles" based on the work of Sebastian Truchet.  Information can be found on Math Munch  and  with an "instructable"  called Amazing Math with Truchet Tiles.

Money
Book:  Lemonade in Winter: A Book About Two Kids Counting Money by Emily Jenkins
Activity Ideas:  Coin Riddles: What's in Your Wallet? (Can you make exactly one dollar - cards with challenges like can you use five coins to make 62-cent?) Using real coins would be a plus.  Then, make a piggy bank to take home.

Palindromes and Accurate Addition
Book/s:  Mom and Dad are Palindromes by Mark Shulman (for introduction)
If You Were a Palindrome by Michael Dahl (read at the end to "debrief"
Too Hot to Hoot by Marvin Terban (riddles to ask throughout the session)
Activity Idea:  Each child should have a blank paged lab book for their calculations.A 100-chard should be included in the lab book.  Explain how number palindromes result (inverting each number and adding together until a palindrome happens).Have them look three and four step palindromes.  What happens when you try to make a palindrome out of 3 or 4-digit numbers?

Prime Numbers, Factors, and Multiples
Book:  The Boy Who Loved Math, The Improbable Life of Paul Erdos by Deborah Heiligman
Activity Idea:  Go through a 100-number Sieve of ERathsothenes to find all the prime numbers (Use a 200-number chart for older kids or kids who are ready for higher numbers).
Extension:  Card game for recognition and memorization.

Probability
Book:  A Very Improbable Story by Edward Einhorn
Activity Idea:  Begin by teaching about the different colors, suits, and cards in a deck of cards.  Then teach about Likely, Unlikely, Possible, Impossible, Even chances, Certain, etc.  Teach about tally marks and draw sets of 10 cards from a bag, discussing the probability of pulling out a certain card, or suit, or face card.....
          Throwing a pair of dice 100 times and recording the results also makes the beginning place of what are the chances....especially if you make bar graph showing your results.  It's actually quite impressive and easy to see the "odds."

Symmetry
Book:  Seeing Symmetry by Loreen Leedy (perhaps not the greatest read aloud, but a good one to point out symmetry as you read.)
Activities:  First, make "freaky creatures" by making each student's name symmetrical by using cursive handwriting...color and add features.  Second, cut out a somewhat-symmetrical image from a magazine, cut it in half on the line of symmetry, glue to a piece of paper, and attempt to draw the other half.  Third, Cut paper symmetry (positive-negative images) as well as snowflakes.

Tangrams
Book:  Grandfather Tang's Story: A Tale Told with Tangrams by Ann Tompert
Activity Ideas:  As you read the story aloud, have kids see if they can make the animals using a set of tangrams provided to each of them.  It would be nice to have a felt board to show, as well.  Then, using the set of tangrams they are given, can the make a square?  A rectangle?  A parrallelogram?  A trapezoid?  A triangle?  Endless possibilities....

Mobius Strip
Book:  Math at the Art Museum
Activity Ideas:  The book Math at the Art Museum includes many different pieces of art with mathematical concepts, but I think I'd do two fun activites relating to the Mobius strip, and what it really means to have one continuous side.  I'd have kids make a Mobius strip, then draw a line (showing how it connects at beginning and end points), then cut out the line to see what happens.  Activity two would be to have kids draw a line (sort of like scribbling, going back and forth over itself a few times, then connecting at the end to have made one continuous line.  It can then be colored in using just two colors where the colors never touch each other.  I'd have them make this into a small art print to take home.

Programming Ideas with a Single Book

Robert's Snow by Grace Lin (ideas included in blog write-up)

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