Arizona Math Standard: 1.NBT.A.1

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

Ready for a tricky counting and divisibility game?

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

These flowers sure are getting bigger faster! How large will they be in step 10? What about step 50?

What if I told you that I’m 341,640 old? Could you figure out what unit I’m using? Hint: it’s not years!

A triangle splits and splits and splits again. How many will there be in step 20?

What if we make a huge spiral of numbers and then highlight only the primes? Well, a bunch of weird patterns show up!

Pascal’s pattern-packed triangle is a potent puzzle for pupils to ponder.

Can any even number be written as the sum of two primes? Goldbach thought so, but we haven’t proven it… yet!

Imagine a world with no hundreds place. We’d have to call it ten tens instead. But then, what would we call the thousands place? How would we read 9999? What if we added one more?

What could we possibly do to make rounding more interesting for students who already get it? In this series, students consider how they might round to values other than “the nearest 10.” How, for example, do we round to the nearest 9? 7? 15?

Every positive integer can be written as the sum of (at most) four perfect squares!

Place value is something we cover in elementary school. It seems simple, but I’d wager that very few adults really understand the topic. I sure didn’t until I worked with non-base-10 number systems in college. Your students can get a taste of this mind-boggling experience by imagining what it would be like if we didn’t have the number 9. What would each digit represent then?

Say you have a dollar. Say you can double that dollar each day: $1, $2, $4, and so on. How long will it take to reach… one million dollars? Not as long as you might think!

So, can you write every odd (greater than 3) as the sum of three primes?

Can any perfect square be written as the sum of two primes?

What do you call two prime numbers who are very close together?

Who can get to 100 first in this simple, but delightful, math game?

The Collatz Conjecture: start with any number and get to 1 using just two rules. It seems to always work…