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Dear Friends of Math Cats,

Greetings of the new millennium! I am pleased to welcome 65 new subscribers to Math Cats News, so that we now have 90 "Friends of Math Cats" from 10 countries, a nice jump from the 25 "friends" we had in November. Ordinarily you’ll be receiving Math Cats News once or twice a month... but not necessarily in December! (I hope you enjoyed the holiday season as much as I did.)

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     MATH CATS IS HONORED
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In December 2000, Math Cats was featured by three sites:

* The Math Forum -- http://www.mathforum.com -- featured Math Cats as one of three "Selected Sites" in the December 2000 Math Forum Newsletter, writing a substantial review beginning: "A site for children that promotes open-ended and playful explorations of important math concepts…" (You can read the review online at: http://mathforum.com/library/resource_types/kids/, where it remains one of two "selected sites" in the category "Recreations: Fun for Kids," out of over 40 other sites in that category).

* Math Goodies -- http://www.mathgoodies.com -- featured Math Cats as its "Selected Site of the Month" in the December 2000 Math Goodies Newsletter, sent to nearly 9,000 math educators.

* Math Cats was one of several featured December "Hot Spots" at The School Page -- http://www.theschoolpage.com.

Math Cats sprang to life just a few months ago, in late September 2000, so it truly is an honor to be recognized by these prominent sites for educators.

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     WHAT’S NEW AT MATH CATS
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1) It’s winter up North! Math Cats is celebrating winter in a variety of ways:

* With a mouse-click on the Contents page, you can make snow start to fall on the site, using snowflakes created with our new snowflake project.

* The new snowflake project in the MicroWorlds section randomly generates snowflakes. Older students might enjoy predicting what angles were used to create the three subbranches of each of the six main spokes; then they can click a button to see how close their guesses are. On a second page of the project, you can control the speed at which snow drifts from the sky.

* There is a new "winter math idea bank" in the "4 older cats" section.

2) There are two new projects in the Explore section:

* Number Stories
Currently you’ll find 13 cute illustrated number stories submitted by Carol Goodrow’s first-grade students from Connecticut. I would love to receive number stories from your students, too!!

* Human Body Geometry
This page features photos of groups of children using their bodies to form geometric shapes and gives a few suggestions for other methods to try (for instance, what polygons can you and a friend form with just your fingers?) Again, I’d love to have your contributions!

3) In the art gallery, we’re pleased to have received a beautiful blinking cat drawn and submitted by a home-schooling mom. And you guessed it—I’d love to receive drawings by your students: of cats, math story problems, or geometric designs. I’d also welcome some photos of cats to sprinkle around the site.

4) There are now 12 idea banks in the "4 older cats" section, with more coming soon:

approaches to math instruction
math activities for families, math carnivals, and classroom math centers
math and literature
addition and subtraction
place value
odd and even
rounding
multiplication (updated this week)
order of operations
fractions (updated this week)
geometry
winter math

Each idea bank includes links to other web sites and resources. (When possible, links have been provided for online purchase of recommended books as well.)

5) The Math Cats site is now searchable using Google search, which you’ll find on the Contents page, the Site Map, and in the "older cats" section. It will take a few weeks for the newest pages to be indexed by Google, but I ’ve been very pleased with the Google search technology within Math Cats and when searching the Web at large (which you can also do from the Math Cats site). Google is my favorite search engine; it does a great job of dealing with phrases and locating meaningful resources.

6) It’s just frivolous, but the chalk cat on the magic chalkboard now taps on the board and beckons for you to click him.

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     GETTING THE MOST OUT OF MATH CATS:
     MATH CATS and WINTER MATH MEASUREMENT ACTIVITIES
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The ideas in the winter math idea bank are intended to get you brainstorming but are far from an exhaustive list! Here’s an example of how to extend one of the suggested activities:

The posted activity is a follow-up to the book, The Mitten, by Jan Brett; children try to guess which of their mittens will hold the most unifix cubes (or other objects. But if they use unifix cubes, then they can stack them together after filling each mitten to see which train of cubes is the longest, forming a 3D graph of the results.).

Now here’s an idea for how to extend the idea of measuring volume in unconventional ways: How can students measure the volume of a boot, relatively accurately, without causing any damage to it? (Filling the boot with water, sand, or salt would NOT be good ideas.) Maybe students could fill the boot with dried beans or peas, then pour out the contents of the filled boot into measuring cups. They could see whose boot fills the most cups. Or they could compare the results using different sizes of beans: if you fill the boot with large dried lima beans, and then fill it a second time with lentils, will you get the same results... will your beans fill the same number of cups? Why or why not? (What if you use unifix cubes or other blocks?) Make predictions before trying it.

I would certainly not suggest counting all of the beans (as one would count the unifix cubes filling the mitten). But a further extension of the measurement activity would be to fill a very small measuring cup or large measuring spoon with the same type of dried legumes, count how many beans (or whatever) it took to fill it this measuring container, then estimate how many beans it took to fill the whole boot based on the bean-count from the small measuring container and a simple calculation of how many of those smaller units would be needed to equal the volume of the boot. (For instance, suppose the whole boot fills 3 cups, and 1/4 cup holds 32 beans. There are 12 1/4 cups in 3 cups, so we’d need to multiply 12 times 32 to get our estimate of the total number of beans. For younger students, this would be a good time to learn about multiplication as repeated addition; they could add 32 + 32 + 32... until they’ve added twelve groups.) After completing the estimate with one type of beans, make an estimate with another type.

This activity lends itself very well to small-group cooperative learning. And by the way, the fun of the original activity is in seeing how much each mitten will stretch, but I’m suggesting boots instead of mittens for the extension because there will be more consistency in the volume from one measuring attempt to the next.

My apologies to those of you in the southern hemisphere (or even in the southern United States) who may enjoying summer temperatures right now! Of course you can always compare the volumes of shoes instead of winter boots, any time of year.

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     SPOTLIGHT ON A SITE
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We may have entered the year 2001, but I’m glad to see that the Maths Year 2000 site -- http://www.mathsyear2000.org - or www.counton.org -- has not changed its name! [Note: It has since been renamed Count On.] The site is packed with math activities and has extensive links to other sites. I particularly like the "Numberland" area of the site, where the winners of a number-drawing competition have been recently posted (example: a six-year-old boy turned the number 14 into two masts with sails on a sailboat carrying one little passenger). Each number from 1 – 100 is celebrated on its own page, filled with math trivia relating to that number, and many of the pages feature more number drawings submitted by children.

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     MATH CATS INTERNATIONAL MATH SURVEY
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If you are interested in participating in our Math Cats International Math Survey, you can read about it in the online version of our last issue --http://www.mathcats.com/grownupcats/samplenews.html -- then send your survey findings to me. (I’d love to have some data to report!!!)

I’ll be continually updating the Math Cats site, so I hope you’ll drop by for regular visits. I welcome your input. And if you like the Math Cats site and Math Cats News, I hope you will help spread the word to others. Please forward this Math Cats News to others! (If you receive this Math Cats News as a forwarded e-mail and would like to subscribe, you can sign up in the "4 older cats" area of Math Cats.)

Thanks,

Wendy Petti of Math Cats
http://www.mathcats.com
wpetti@mathcats.com

(P.S. If you ever want to unsubscribe, just drop me a line at the e-mail address above. You can write "unsubscribe" or use the words of your choice to convey the message!)