I’m excited to share with you the Big Magic Puzzle. I love magic square puzzles, but I’ve never done much more with them in my class then give out the occasional magic square puzzle worksheet. So, when I ran across a different-than-normal magic square puzzle in The Ultimate Clever Puzzle Book, I knew I had …
Number Puzzles
I ran across an interesting vintage math puzzle on eBay recently. I’ve never heard of Tigo Puzzles, but I definitely want to know more now! The eBay listing is no longer active, but I did save the images posted by the seller. Apparently this book of Tigo Puzzles is based on Tigo, a unique new …
The last time I taught Algebra 1, I used Step Puzzles by Naoki Inaba to introduce the idea of arithmetic sequences. I tweeted about it, but in the craziness of packing up my classroom and house to move last summer they never made it up on my blog. I was first introduced to the amazing …
I’m making the most of the $2 I spent on this recent Goodwill find. The Giant Book of Hard-to-Solve Mind Puzzles is out-of-print which makes used copies from Amazon VERY expensive. If you happen upon a copy of this book at a thrift store or used book shop, it’s definitely worth picking up a copy! …
Genius Blocks are my latest classroom creation. They are perfect for a classroom puzzle table or a creative way to practice mental math with integer operations. Last summer, I ran across several craft ideas on twitter involving wooden blocks. So I promptly went on Amazon and bought a bag of 100 one inch wooden cubes. …
Today I’m sharing a puzzle I’m calling Nine Squares Puzzle. A few days ago, Shelli tweeted about needing more puzzles for next year since her advisory students will have already seen the ones she has used previously. This reminded me that I too will have this problem because my Pre-Calc classes will be made almost …
I’m here today to share with you the Twelve Envelopes Puzzle. I’ve finally reached a point in the summer where my brain has started thinking about ideas for the new school year. Actually, I’ve been thinking about next year since around February or March, but I’ve finally stopped *just* thinking about next year and started …
Day one and two are in the books! I’ll share a bit more about what I did with my classes on the first two days in a later post, but I want to go ahead and share the mathematical challenge I used with my students on the first day since I have got several questions …
Yesterday, I shared about all the amazing things I learned/experienced as part of the Tulsa Math Teachers’ Circle Summer Immersion Workshop. As part of that post, I mentioned that I had created some factor tree puzzles after being inspired by the puzzles shared by Dr. Harold Reiter and the puzzle created by one of the …
Today, I want to share a seven times seventy puzzle that I put together for the 4th grade class that my husband and I teach together on Wednesday nights at church. One Wednesday, the goal of the lesson we were teaching was the importance of forgiveness. We learned about the bible story where Jesus was …
This school week was super-short due to the Oklahoma Teacher Walk-Out, but I still managed to put out a new puzzle on the puzzle table. The goal of the hidden equation puzzle is to circle one symbol from each column so that a true mathematical statement results. I placed the puzzle in a dry erase …
Today I’m sharing with you the Sum to Twenty Puzzle by Marcy Cook. In Math Concepts, we ran out of That’s Logical puzzles a few weeks ago, so I had to find a new source of daily warm-ups. Instead, I’ve started using puzzles from “THINK ABOUT IT! Mathematics Problems of the Day” by Marcy Cook. …
Today I want to share the Maximize the Sum Puzzle with you. My Algebra 1 classes managed to get a bit off schedule of one another this past week. So, I declared Monday to be a “Catch-Up Day.” My classes that were behind were given our latest assignment and the class period to work on …
About a month ago, I was contacted by the Grabarchuk Family who are the creators of Strimko logic puzzles to see if I would be interested in reviewing one of their new puzzle books. Being the puzzle lover that I am, I had to say YES! So, full disclosure: I received the book mentioned in …
Last week, I came across a fun perfect square puzzle. Place a set of numbers in a row such that adjacent pairs of numbers always sum to a perfect square. I decided to create a version of the perfect square puzzle for my students to try who finished their 9 weeks test early. To keep …
Today I want to share one of my favorite puzzles that I used with my students last year. It involves one of my favorite things in the world, Post It Notes! I learned about this puzzle from Chris Smith‘s amazing maths newsletter. If you’re not signed up to receive his newsletters, you need to do …
Last week, I ran across an activity by Frank Tapson called “How Far Can YOU Climb?” (page 34). The premise of the puzzle is quite simple. Form the longest chain possible by moving horizontally or vertically from one number to an increasing number. Here are Frank Tapson’s instructions: I printed off a class set, and …
These Angle Maze Puzzles from Naoki Inaba challenge students to find a path through a maze by being able to recognize common angle measurements. Draw a path through the maze from S to G. Each time you pass through a numbered circle, the path must form that angle in degrees. This summer, I blogged about …
I’m excited to introduce you to the 5-4-3-2-1 Challenge. On Sunday morning, Nancy Swank tweeted me a link to a puzzle on NPR’s website. This shouldn’t come as a surprise because Nancy is the entire reason why NPR spent an entire day in my classroom in 2014. I followed the link and started reading …
Recently, I posted about some awesome area and volume puzzles created by Naoki Inaba. You can read that post here. While researching those puzzles and looking for possible online sources for them, I found some on Mr. Inaba’s website. This led me to start wondering, “What kind of other puzzles has he created?” So, ever-curious …
Area Maze Puzzles from prolific Japanese puzzle creator Naoki Inaba have become quite popular in the United States. This hasn’t always been the case. I first learned about these puzzles from a tweet from Lisa Bejarano. At the time of her tweet, you could only really get your hands on a large number of area …
How do y’all feel about KenKen puzzles? Love them? Good. Me too. Today I want to post about a program that you may not be aware of. It’s called KenKen Classroom. The premise is simple. Visit the link. Give them your e-mail. Then, watch your inbox every Friday for free KenKen puzzles that are formatted …
One of the things I love most about the #MTBoS is that for every idea I blog, I seem to get three or more ideas back in return. Recently, Christine Mishra left a comment on an old post from 2013 with a link to a (new-to-me) logic puzzle: Futoshiki. Christine thinks these would be awesome …
Petals Around the Rose is a fun and frustrating dice-based brainteaser. It makes a great activity for the first week of school in math class! I first learned about Petals Around the Rose from Annie Forest in her blog post on 8 Ideas for the Last Minutes of Math Class. Usually, I read a post …
One of the things I’ve most liked about introducing my students to new logic puzzles is that they’ve been new to me as well! I was initially hesitant to try the hashiwokakero puzzles with my students because they sounded scary. I learned about these puzzles from reading the slides from Jeffrey Wanko’s NCTM presentation. You …