Adventures in Math

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”  ―  Ernest Hemingway Welcome to the new and improved Adventures in Common Core! I'm so excited to have a new design and can't wait to share more math with you! As math problems and videos continue to go viral, I feel compelled to step up to the plate to address some of the misconceptions. The angry rants about Common Core ruining our children are not letting up, and it seems that the basis of many of these oppositions is that Common Core makes math harder rather than easier, that it has convoluted mathematics somehow.  This couldn't be further from the truth.  Many parents who are anti-Common Core have the best of intentions; they want what is best for their child, and when they see something outside of their own comfort zone, they jump to their child's defense: "This is too hard! My child has always been proficient in math and now they're struggling! They go...

Some of the best math is the math that happens organically, math born out of a need to answer a real-world question that has importance to the mathematician. Since Spring has officially sprung, naturally the meaningful math that is happening at our house revolves around plastic Easter eggs and the treats that go inside. The problem solving began with these materials below: Add caption My daughter is supposed to bring 12 filled Easter eggs for the Kindergarten Easter egg hunt this week, so the question that we wanted to answer was: If we want each egg to have the same amount of Smarties, how many packages of smarties will each egg get? Two powerful questions guided our conversation: I asked Cora what she noticed. "I noticed that there are 12 eggs because there are two bags of 6, and I noticed there are a lot of Smarties!" I then asked if she thought there were more or less than 12 packages. She thought about it for a brief moment and said with confidence, ...