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Greetings from Math Cats!

I write to you in the waning hours of 02/02/02, the second day of the second month of the second year of the new millennium. (I know this date is already a memory for those of you in far-off time zones... oh well! Every day holds mathematical interest of one sort or another.)

At the start of the new year, I began asking new subscribers to tell me if they are teachers, parents, or students, and what age level(s) they are involved with. Our new subscribers include teachers of Pre-K through high school, homeschooling parents and children, and college students in math or teaching programs. Welcome, all!

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     WHAT’S NEW AT MATH CATS
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* FACT FAMILY CARDS
http://www.mathcats.com/explore/factfamilycards.html

This brand-new area of Math Cats includes:

o   printable hexagon-shaped fact family cards for addition/subtraction and multiplication/division (as well as blank cards for designing your own)

o   a cut-and-paste fact family "house" for holding the deck of cards while hiding one or two numbers at a time

o   many hands-on and mental math activities supporting the development of basic math concepts and skills

The fact family cards and activities can be used for individualized math work in school or at home. They can become a meaningful replacement for math worksheets.

To track students' use of the cards at home, you can place a simple chart in a homework folder with these headings and a place for parental remarks or initials:

date   number range   activities   minutes   remarks

Be creative! You can brainstorm many uses for the blank hexagon cards at all grade levels. How about fraction cards or decimal cards or integer cards or money cards or multidigit mental math cards? You can ask teams of students to develop creative sets for addition/subtraction or multiplication/division of these numbers and then trade sets with their classmates.

* SEASONAL MICROWORLDS ACTIVITIES
http://www.mathcats.com/microworlds.html

This month, the following activities take top billing in the MicroWorlds section:

*   Hearts
     Make colorful heart designs... Create unusual valentines!

*   Snow
     Generate random snowflakes and try to guess their angles.

*   Olympic Rings
     Make interlocking Olympic rings in honor of the Winter Olympics.

As always, the MicroWorlds activities require the free downloadable MW Web Player; you'll find a link to the old and new plug-ins from every page of that section. If you've upgrade to Internet Explorer 6.0, you'll need the new plug-in.

How to print your MicroWorlds designs:
     You need to save your design as a screenshot (on a PC, use the PrtSc key) and paste it into a drawing program such as Paint, then crop it. Save it as a GIF image and print.

* MORE MATH CRAFTS
http://www.mathcats.com/crafts.html

Since our last issue on December 12, Math Cats has added these new math crafts:

*   21-Point Thread Design (icosihenagon)
*   Connect the Dots (to make tessellating designs)
*   Tree of Hexagons
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     SITE SPOTLIGHT
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* MATH DANCE
http://www.mathdance.org

The Math Dance site presents creative lessons combining math and movement activities. Many of the activities are appropriate for Pre-K or Kindergarten all the way through grade 12.

* THE PLATONIC SOLIDS
http://www.sbu.ac.uk/water/platonic2.html

Rotate these 5 geometric solids online. I've seen lots of polyhedra applets, but I find this page especially easy to use and appealing. Having all 5 solids on one page makes it easy to compare their properties. For instance, try to position each solid to display the fewest number of faces. Which solids can you position so that only one face is showing? two? three? Can you make the 20-sided icosahedron look like a pentagon?

* WOMEN IN MATH PROJECT
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~wmnmath/

The Women in Math Project includes:
*  links to publications and associations of interest
*  biographies of women in mathematics
*  links to history of mathematics sites
*  links to conferences and workshops of interest
*  links to professional opportunities (grants, jobs, scholarships)
*  statistics on women in mathematics

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     MATH CATS -- NOT JUST FOR KIDS!
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A British professor of a course in "technobiology" in which students create Logo computer simulations of biological events wrote to tell me that his students had visited ten relevant websites and had rated their first and second favorite sites. He reported that Math Cats was the hands-down favorite, with 90% of his college students ranking it among their top two sites. The Math Cats MicroWorlds section and Math Cats Art Gallery are often cited in other college courses in computer programming and technology in education, and yet they can be enjoyed equally by young children.

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     MICROWORLDS... my favorite software
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My personal list of essential software (as a teacher and a webmaster) is very very short: word-processing, spreadsheet, an Internet browser, e-mail application... and MicroWorlds. I am not a computer programmer by any means, but I find it easy and stimulating to use MicroWorlds to create my own math projects. I've also used MicroWorlds to create all of the graphics on the Math Cats site, including the printable fact family cards and all of the graphics accompanying the activities. You can download a free 30-day demo version of MicroWorlds at the LCSI site:

http://www.microworlds.com

and try it out for yourself. Get started by using MicroWorlds' pull-down help menu, the Project Library at the LCSI site, and some of the procedures included in the MicroWorlds section of Math Cats.

Let me know if you decide to purchase MicroWorlds (single-copy or site license); I can get you a substantial discount off of the prices posted on the LCSI website.

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If you like the Math Cats site and Math Cats News, I hope you will help spread the word. Please forward this Math Cats News to others! If you have received 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:

http://www.mathcats.com/grownupcats.html

Thanks,

Wendy Petti, the one human at Math Cats
mathcats.com