Ann McCallum Books

The Gaithersburg Book Festival is just around the corner and is even bigger and better this year– I hear that Jud Ashman and the organization committee is going for 20,000+ attendees! Go, Gaithersburg Book Festival!

Here’s a teaser from this morning’s Fox5 news. Mayor Katz and Gaithersburg Elementary fourth graders Nicholas and Giselle help make Tessellating Two-Color Brownies while Fox5′s Holly Morris reports on Eating Math!

Here’s the link:

http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/18435191/holly-morris-visits-the-gaithersburg-book-festival

Here’s hoping the weather is terrific! (But eating math can be done rain or shine!)

The Gaithersburg Book Festival is just around the corner (Is it really already May?!). Eat Your Math Homework: Recipes for Hungry Minds will make an appearance. Please join me at 11:30 to 12:00 on May 19 in the Willa Cather Pavilion to cook up some tasty math and have some mathy fun. We’ll be sampling probability with Probability Trail Mix and counting bunnies to figure out the Fibonacci Number Sequence. Lots of freebies to give away, too!

And, just to make things even more exciting, please stay tuned for Fox 5′s morning news on May 16. As a pre-festival teaser, I’ll be cooking up some Tessellating Two-Color Brownies. Yum!! See you then!

So there you are at a little league baseball game. Your friend is up to bat. Do you find yourself keeping track of strikes and balls by using your fingers? When else do your fingers come in handy for counting and remembering things?

It turns out that people the world over have used fingers (sometimes toes, too) as take-along calculators for a very long time (Hmmm…, is that why our number system is based on tens? I wonder…).

Morra is a fun game that uses fingers and counting to play. In fact, since it requires no equipment and just two people to play, you can pick up a game anywhere! It’s an ancient game that’s been played in various regions of the world for a very long time. Here’s how to play:

Two players stand with closed fists and face each other. Count to three and each player shows 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 fingers. At the same time, each player calls out a number from 1 to 10. If a player calls out a number that totals the fingers on her hand AND her opponent’s hand, she wins a point. Continue playing until one person reaches ten points.

Want to make it extra challenging? Use BOTH hands and call out a number between 1 and 20!

Okay, so adding up the grocery bill using the calculator function of our smart phones is definitely something new. But keeping track of stuff–how many animals did you kill today, or, gee, how many hours has it been since half the tribe left to get firewood– is not new at all. In fact, ever since, well, pretty much forever, people have needed to count things. The first calculators were very handy. That is, people could count and compare using fingers and toes. How convenient that there were ten of each! (Ever wonder why our number system is based on ten?). But, to actually record the passage of time or the amount of something, ancient peoples often used tallies (up and down marks on bone or wood) to keep track. Here’s a picture of a very old tally stick called the Ishango Bone (named this because it was found in the village of Ishango in the heart of Africa).

This bone, over 20,000 years old, shows how ancient peoples used tally marks instead of numbers to keep track. Scientists believe that these notches were used to mark off a calendar system. As old as the Ishango Bone is, it is not the oldest known tally stick. The Lebombo Bone is approximately 35,000 years old.

How do we use tallies today? Think of when you would a tally instead of a number.

(Hint: keeping track of points in a game? taking a survey?)

Make Your Own ‘Ancient’ Tally Stick

What you need

a clean chicken bone

a butter knife (or black marker)

What to do

1. Ask for adult assistance to thoroughly clean the chicken bone.

2. Plan what you want to keep track of. (the number of items in one of your collections, a point system for doing chores, how much allowance you’ve saved up, how many birds you see in a certain period of time, or maybe the number of books you’ve read. Choose something that you will add tallies to)

3. Use the example of the Ishango Bone to cut tally notches in the bone (alternatively, you can make tally marks using a fine, black marker)

4. Use the internet or another source to see how people continued to use tally sticks to help keep track!

To solve this oh-so-delicious logic problem, please, I beg you: PLAY WITH YOUR FOOD!

Add a little pizzazz to dinner tonight with a easy to assemble pizza puzzler. Not only will you enjoy a tasty dinner or snack, you will also get your daily dose of math fun. Here’s what you do:

Assemble a cheese topped pizza from a ready made crust. I like to use my own spaghetti and tomato sauce for the pizza sauce. Sprinkle the pizza with cheese and place seven pieces of pepperoni as shown in this picture. Bake as directed on the package.

Okay, here’s the fun part… Cut the pizza using exactly (no more, no less) three straight lines all the way across the pizza. Here’s the clincher: Once the pizza is cut using the three straight lines, there should be exactly one piece of pepperoni on each slice of pizza.

Helpful hint, you might want to lay a straw or string across the pizza before actually cutting it. (The answer is further down in this post)

Happy eating!

(Answer below)

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ANSWER:

Fun activities and lotsa math! Please check out:

www.eatyourmathhomework.com

What: Please come for an afternoon of Tessellating Two-Color Brownies and hands-on fun. I will be speaking about my path to publication, but also, everyone will be encouraged to get their own hands in the pot– with Probability Trail Mix, that is. My latest book, Eat Your Math Homework: Recipes for Hungry Minds is the highlight of the event, but everyone will be encouraged to write and play and share their own experiences. Books will be available for purchase.

Where: Twinbrook Library  202 Meadow Hall Drive, Rockville, MD 20851

When: February 11 from 2 to 4 p.m.

Also, please check out the new and improved website: www.eatyourmathhomework.com

I’ve been thinking a lot about kids and math these days. Certainly, there’s been a lot of work to promote Eat Your Math Homework and with it, I’ve met lots of people who either, a) Love math and love the idea of pairing something wonderful–food– with the topic, or b) Would rather read anything else, do anything else, be anywhere else than in a room where the topic is math.

I started getting serious about writing books for kids about math probably eight years ago now. Then, as now, it seems to be a hard sell to at least a large segment of the market. (Evidence: recent popular T-shirts with ‘allergic to algebra’ or ‘I’m too pretty to do math’ on them). People don’t naturally gravitate to math books. To many, I feel like math still conjures up pages and pages of deadly math worksheets that are either so darn boring that they are a cure for insomnia (Thanks, Bill, for that saying), or they are too complicated to figure out and so avoidance is the key to success. Don’t think about math and it will go away.

I’m not a genius math student at all. I do love math and I find it fascinating, but my skills are limited. Let’s just say that if I had to take a college-level math course, I’d be in trouble. Like anything, math can be tricky. My sincere hope with the books I’ve had published so far is to get kids to really, really love math. Just like broccoli in cheese sauce (Would we enjoy the plain, steamed variety as much– I think not), math and food or math and anything fun is a winning combination.

Here’s a writing (or thinking) exercise to do for fun.

Let’s start with fairytales, a genre that is beloved to most of us: Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White… How does math figure into these stories? How could you do a retelling where math is the main attraction? (Or at least, it figures prominently– oops, no pun intended!) That whole issue of the time countdown until midnight is a great math connection for Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty, well, how about something about how long her hair grows if it grows x inches in y number of years? My image of that fairytale is of her long, long gorgeously golden hair. Oooo– how about Snow White and the seven dwarfs? If every dwarf  mines seven feet of rock per day and every foot holds 7 precious stones and they do this for a week, how many precious stones will they accumulate?

Okay, so maybe that’s too complicated, too much work. How else can one make math fun? Projects, cooking (For sure!), every day math? Attitude is key. I feel like if one is enthusiastic about the topic, children will be too. It’s the holiday season. How about making mathematical gingerbread houses? If you start with the easy-peezy graham cracker kind, (put 6 graham crackers together in a house shape with gingerbread house icing which will dry and keep the pieces together solidly) the fun will be in how to decorate it in a mathematical way. Ie. How many gumdrops are there around the perimeter of the roof? What shapes are the windows? How long, exactly, is the path from the door?

Lots of rambling today. I hope these ideas sparked your interest. Happy holidays and best math wishes, Ann

Okay, okay, so it’s a little early… Well, a lot early. Still, before we know it, it WILL be the season! Here’s something to try in a few weeks…

Triangular Number Christmas Tree

1, 3, 6, 10… What’s the pattern?

Hint: If you can’t crack the code, try making a drawing of each number. Do you notice that you can make each number into a triangle?

1                           3                               6                                       10                                       15  . . .

These numbers are called triangular numbers. To model the pattern, why not whip up a Triangular Number Christmas Tree out of melt-in-your-mouth, black-bottom cupcakes? Here’s the recipe:

½ butter (1 stick)

1 cup sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 ½ cups flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup milk

Large, dark chocolate chips

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Prepare cupcake tin by placing paper liners or greasing the tins
3. Mix the butter, sugar, egg, and vanilla thoroughly.
4. Add the flour and baking soda, alternating with the milk
5. Put several chocolate chips in each cupcake paper. Fill ½ full with dough.
6. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center of each cupcake comes out clean.
7. Assemble the cupcakes as shown in the photo

How many? How much? It’s a practical, necessary skill that we use every day. How many minutes left before we have to go? How much spaghetti to cook for dinner tonight? Estimation is important for children, too. What better way than to introduce or reinforce the concept with a batch of ESTIMATION COOKIES? With these easy-as-1-2-3 cookies, children can estimate how many M&M’s are in each cookie before enjoying a melt in your mouth treat (Use M&M’s because they stay more intact than chocolate chips do and therefore, are easier to count).

Estimation Questions:

1. How many steps is it from here to the classroom/kitchen door?

2. How long will it take to pick up everything from the floor? (Ha! Ha! A beauty of a question because it serves a double purpose!)

3. How many full tiles are there on the floor? (Maybe multiplication can come in handy here)

4. How many grapes in the bowl?

5. How many cups of milk in a glass?

The thing about estimation is to get kids to feel comfortable making a guess. At first, children may be hesitant to make a random guess and their estimates might be way off, but it’s so important to encourage an attempt. Estimation, like any skill, gets better the more you practice. With very young children, estimating how many cheerios in a spoonful or how many raisins in a box is a terrific way to promote counting skills, too. As children get more sophisticated, they may opt for a more efficient way of counting– ie, by 2′s or by 5′s. Estimating followed by checking by counting promotes number literacy. But an estimation ‘lesson’ doesn’t even have to be that formal. Whenever you’re at the grocery store, make a game of estimating how much the groceries will cost that day. Children might have no idea, but to try and then to learn the correct answer is to develop a sense of number, crucial for a solid mathematics foundation. It also makes the task of estimation a familiar, and therefore less scary, practice.

For a fun idea about estimating, try making these ESTIMATION COOKIES. They’re perfect for a rainy day or a make ahead weekend project for lunch boxes the following week.

RECIPE

Estimation Cookies

1 stick butter

1 egg

1 cup packed brown sugar

1 1/4 cups flour

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup instant oatmeal

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup M&M candies

Cream sugar, butter, egg, and vanilla. Add other ingredients and stir well. Stir in M&M’s. Bake around 10 minutes in a 375 degree oven. Let cool and harden on the tray before moving the cookies to a tray. Estimate how many M&M’s are in a cookie and then, well, eat it to find out!