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After last week’s exploration of triangular, and the introduction to square numbers, we continued looking at polygonal numbers in the form of a hexagon. The children noticed that 36 is both a triangular and square number. This week they were able to see that 91 is both a triangular number and a hexagonal centered number. 

Whenever I visit Revolutionary or Civil War battlegrounds, I always marvel at how ammunition was stored. Cannonballs were stacked in triangles of spheres and it was referred to as cannonballing. 

After exploring the outer regions of Chinese Stick Multiplication, I started to play with line multiplication in another way. I drew two horizontal lines about two inches apart and for the example 2 x 3, placed two points on the top line and three points on the bottom line and then connected each of the top points with each of the bottom points. There were a total of six lines representing the product of 2 x 3.

Human beings evolved about 200,000 years ago as Homo Sapiens in Africa. The research suggests that humans were only be able to process addition and subtraction until around 4000 years ago when multiplication and division emerged.

I had the pleasure of debuting a new game I call “Dollar Word Math Game.” First I introduced a third method of valuing the letters A-Z, called the Most Frequent Value Method. Using the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th Edition revised, 2004, we were able to determine what are the most frequently used letters in the English language. The children were spot on for the two most popular letters, E and A.