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Birthdays are fun because they are special to each of us. In fact, every day on average about 18 million people worldwide celebrate their birthday.

Mathematicians like birthdays because they can each be made into an 8-digit number with 2-digits for the month and day and 4-digits for the year. One digit months get a zero before the number like my month of July would be 07.

January 01, February 02, March 03, April 04, May 05, June 06, July 07, August 08, September 09, Octobler 10, November 11, December 12.

Developmentally, kids will write many numbers in mirro image until they are 7 or 8 years old and there is nothing wrong with that. However, one of the wonders of mathematics is being able to see patterns and to follow sequences. Training them to follow the correct form of numbers can help to teach them to recognize patterns.

After exploring the wonderful words that are palindromes, we turned to numbers that read the same both forwards and backwards.

We kicked off the new year with a lesson teaching the children how to find the factor pairs of 100. Of course, we didn't use the word "factor," but we had the children make piles of one hundred Mathlete Dollars in a single denomization.

First, we had them look at using the One Dollar denomination. Of course, this would have taken forever, counting out 1 to 100 by consecutive integers. They were excited to learn that Albert Einstein is on the One Dollar Mathlete note.