About Kenilworth maths club
April 2019
We run a fun mathematics club for home educating families, incorporating the Liverpool fun maths road show materials, lots of art/craft maths activities and various hands on mathematical manipulatives - mathematical puzzles, games and toys. We include group discussions and activities as well as laid out activities for you to pick and choose from and work on at your own pace, with assistance available as required.
Topics
Meetings are varied, you'll see different activites each time. For example, we include some of the following in meetings- Mathematical magic and card tricks
- coding - secret codes, Ceaser cypher, etc
- Christmas theme in December
- topology, knots, Mobius band, Klein bottle, all kinds of funny shapes and surfaces. Why is a donut like a tea cup?
- graph theory - paths through mazes, etc
- cubes - puzzles of making cubes, how to do the Rubic's cube, geometry of the cube, making origami cubes, cubes in higher dimensions, cubes as building blocks....
- Fractions, and other numbers that are not whole - What is "Pi" and other interesting numbers
- coding and cryptography
- Polyhedra, giant geodesic dome....
- Circles, spirals, wheels, things that go round...
- Infinitely big and infinitesimally small - very big and very tiny - fractals, fractions, calculus, paradoxes of infinity....
- Probabilities, games of chance, what does probability mean
- measuring things, averages...
- skip counting with drums/music for younger children...
- games with counters - board games, solitare, tower of Hanoi, snakes and ladders...
- Building blocks, such as Kapla, Keva, Citi blocks
Books, Links, References
- Games for Mathematics: Peggy Kaye
- From the MSRI maths circles library:
- Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers, Alexander Zvonkin
- Math Circles for Elementary School Students, Natasha Rozhkovskaya
- A Moscow Math Circle: Week-by-week Problem Sets, Sergey Dorichenko
- Recreational/educational mathematics books
- Mathematical Mosaic: Patterns & Problem Solving, by Ravi Vakil
- Online books
- Peter Taylor's high school mathematics book (or you might want to start here and follow links) (see also his pages and even his articles. I find his approach very inspiring)
- Work books etc
- We like the Beast Academy books. As well as Beast Academy, the same people do material for higher levels.
- On line references:
- Nrich - Cambridge University fun educational mathematics web site
- Liverpool University fun maths road show materials
- Building blocks maths Keva, Keva, Citiblocs, Kapla.
- old pages