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Maria's Math News, Vol. 68, January 2013

I love teaching, and I love math. This newsletter is my way of reaching out and helping you to teach it, too. is your source for easy to use math practice.  Timed tests, fractions, patterns, rounding, word problems and more!

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Hello! Welcome to the new year! I hope you all will have a good & happy year 2013.


1. Math Mammoth news
2. Factor domino game
3. The 2013 mathematics game
4. Probability worksheets
5. Tidbits

1. Math Mammoth news

Soon... we will have available a South African version of Math Mammoth. Grade 2 will be finished first (during January), followed by grade 1, then grades 3-4. An "international" version is also in the plans, after South African is done. For both of these, the main difference to the regular version will be that they will be all metric.

Upcoming sale notices

Homeschool Buyers Co-op will have a "short-run" Group buy for Math Mammoth from January 21 till January 31. This is for the large bundle products only. CDs will be available too! The discount will be 20% to 50% depending on the number of participants.

I will also run a 20% off sale at Kagi starting January 15. This is for all products.

2. Factor domino game

Look at this NEAT visual representation of the counting numbers:

(originally from Mike Naylor)

The first activity you can give to your students or children is to figure out HOW it is made! What is it based on? The last number on this chart is 49. Can you figure out how to make the next number, 50?

Malke shared a cool factor domino game with her readers. We played it, too. Here's one of our games:

(We had a few cards that were not the same size; just ignore that.)

Basically, you may put a card next to another if they share a factor. Using these visual dominoes makes children easily learn about factors and factorization. Please visit Malke's blog to read the rules and see more details.

Here are a few other things you can do with these cards:

  1. Organize them in some way. For example, you could find all multiples of 5, all multiples of 4, or all primes.

  2. Pick up two cards randomly and tell their least common multiple (LCM). This can easily be done if you notice their factorization from the visual (the LCM has to include all the factors from both numbers).

As to finding the greatest common factor, you can do that too, but I feel it would work better with bigger numbers.

You can read about this game on my blog too, and leave comments there.

3. The 2013 mathematics game

Happy Year 2 0 1 3 !

The 2013 mathematics game is a neat game with numbers, suitable for many ages.

The basic idea is very simple: using the digits from 2013, form mathematical expressions for the counting numbers 1-100.

You have to use every digit 2, 0, 1, and 3. For example, number 5 could be formed as

(2 + 3) × 1 + 0 = 5


(2 + 3) ÷ 1 + 0 = 5


3! − 2 + 1 + 0 = 5

(3! is 3 factorial, which means 1 × 2 × 3)

You can even use decimals:

.2 /0.1 + 3 + 0 = 5

So, the task is to do this for numbers 1-100! For smaller students, you could limit it to numbers 1-10.

Please see Denises's post for the full rules and other info.

4. Probability worksheets

Image by dmelchordiaz
Looking for free probability worksheets?

On my site, you can find some probability worksheets and lessons in my book Math Mammoth Statistics and Probability - for about grades 5-7. Math Mammoth Grade 7 worksheet collection also has just a few.

Beyond that, there are several fine websites that offer collections of FREE probability worksheets, mainly for middle school level, when students first study probability:

Image by Doug88888
Math Worksheets 4 Kids - probability worksheets
This site offers a nice variety of probability worksheets, using dice, coins, cards, marbles, spinners, and so on. Most are about simple probability, but one section has worksheets for compound probability (independent/dependent events section). statistics and probability
This site has some variety: topics not only include simple probability but also dependent events, word problems, and experimental probability.

Image by cobalt
Compound events worksheet generator
Here you can generate a worksheet with word problems about compound probability. probability worksheets
Lots of them and colorful, too. Most don't have many questions and it seems they all are about simple probability.

5. Tidbits


Till next time,
Maria Miller
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