One Hundred Ten Dollar Words (November 2 - 8, 2010)

Many Mathletes over the years have dabbled in finding Dollar Words.  These are English words that when you give a value to each letter add up to one hunderd exactly.  A=1 B=2 C=3 .....  Z=26.

One example is Pumpkin.

There are many stategies to finding these words and even more to combine the numbers.  I will be teaching a method of circling your ones place numbers and combining them with brackets to add up to 10 or 20 with remainders.  Then they add the tens place numbers and combine the ones place total to get their sum.

Since many Mathletes remember Dollar Words from previous years, this week we focused on words with a value of 110. One example is "Seventy."

I would like to see the Mathletes try dozens of words to try and make 110.  The more tries (with work shown), the more Mathlete Dollars.

The pdf has helpful worksheets for both Dollar Words and 110 Words.  I also listed hundreds of Dollar Words so they can practice the adding method with brackets.  Try to avoid giving them the list of 110 words so they try to think creatively about how to make these work.

Come up with a bunch of prefixes and suffixes, and figure out the points for those.

For example, the suffix 'ing' is worth 9 + 14 + 7 = 30 points, so if you can come up with other words that are worth 80 points, you can stick 'ing' on the end.

There are lots of common suffixes like this: 'ed', 'er', 'ers', and so on. There are lots of common prefixes, too: 'un', 're', 'pre', 'inter', 'con', and so on.

The idea here is to break down a large problem into smaller problems that are more easily solved.