Math Puzzles and Brainteasers, Grades 3-5 E-Book

Terry Stickels

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: Math Puzzles and Brainteasers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 154

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Number puzzles, spatial/visual puzzles, cryptograms, Sudoku, Kokuro, logic puzzles, and word games like Frame Games are all a great way to teach math and problem-solving skills to elementary and middle school students. In these two new collections, puzzle master Terry Stickels provides puzzles and brain games that range from simple to challenging and are organized by grade level and National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) content areas. Each book offers over 300 brain games that will help students learn core math concepts and develop critical thinking skills. The books include a wide range of puzzle types and cover a variety of math topics, from fractions and geometry to probability and algebra.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise

Jossey-Bass Teacher

Title Page

Copyright Page

Foreword

Acknowledgements

About This Book

The Author

Introduction

Some Puzzle -Solving Tips

Part I - NUMBERS and OPERATIONS

Whole Numbers

Rational Numbers

Part II - GEOMETRY and MEASUREMENT

Geometry

Measurement

Part III - MATHEMATICAL REASONING

Visual

Other

Part IV - ALGEBRA, STATISTICS, and PROBABILITY

Answers

Praise forMath Puzzles and Brainteasers

Terry Stickels combines his masterful ability to create diverse, challenging and just plain fun puzzles with a wide range of math concepts, in a playful way that encourages the solver to discover their own unique methods of finding solutions.

—David Kalvitis, author of The Greatest Dot-to-Dot Books in the World

Logical, numerical, spatial/visual, and creative thinking problems can all be found within these covers, embracing a wide spectrum of thinking skills for developing minds. Terry Stickels also encourages indulgence in mathematical play, which for young students is an indispensable component of motivated and successful problem solving.

—Barry R. Clarke,Mind Gym compiler, The Daily Telegraph (UK)

Even kids who are not math nerds will enjoy this book. Stickels hits the perfect mix of brainteasers: They’re challenging while still managing to be great fun at the same time!

—Casey Shaw, Creative Director, USA WEEKEND magazine

Terry Stickels is clearly this country’s Puzzle Laureate. He has concocted a delightful and challenging volume of brainteasers that belong in every math teacher’s library. Focused specifically on grades 3-5 and grades 6-8, these puzzles both educate and sharpen children’s critical thinking skills. As an award-winning puzzle constructor myself, I am always in awe of what Terry comes up with.

—Sam Bellotto Jr., Crossdown

Jossey-Bass Teacher

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eISBN : 978-0-470-56467-7

PB Printing

Foreword

One of the advantages of growing up in a large extended family is that on numerous occasions I have had the opportunity to observe a miraculous transformation: A young, helpless, and ignorant epsilon—as the mathematician Paul Erdos called young children—comes into the world, begins to eat, drink, cry, dirty his or her diapers, grow (and grow and grow), and, last but not least, assimilate and process information about the world around this new being. Somewhere around the age of three that child becomes a genius.

The idea that all children for a short while in their lives are geniuses has been put forth in both humorous and serious ways by pundits and quipsters galore. The imaginations of children at this young age are unfettered, their preconceptions virtually nonexistent. The names “Plato” and “Socrates,” which appeared on ear tags of stuffed animals of a granddaughter of mine, immediately became “Playdough” and “Soccer-team.” After all, who were these strange Greeks who were impinging on her sovereign right to name her own animals? The animals still would recognize their names, wouldn’t they?

A daughter of mine once politely refused an offering of sauerkraut at a neighbor’s dinner table, saying that she didn’t like “sourcrap.” Another time I found one of my children blithely sitting in an empty laundry basket counting—or at least trying to count—the hundreds of square holes in its sides. The sole purpose of the endeavor apparently was to get some up close and personal information about the basket.

These personal recollections are not intended to impress the readers of this book with the cleverness or cuteness of my own progeny. Everyone who has raised a child or who is growing up will have story after story of their own. Some of these stories will be more humorous than those given here, some will show more intelligence on the part of the children involved, some will reveal unexpected turns of kindness, and some will parody the imperfections and mannerisms of the child’s parents. The point is that in the life of every child is a period when that child is highly creative, unassuming, and, in my opinion, highly intelligent. Children look at the world through a pair of magical glasses, wired to, and designed to program the most complicated computer in the world, the human brain.

Then something goes terribly awry. Children gradually become larger physically, a bit more mature mentally, and we set about formally socializing and educating them. They lose their magical glasses and naiveté, and many of the educational processes to which we subject them seem to take on the form of a mass forced-feeding. But then, amazingly, a dozen or so years down the line, we begin to hear comments to the effect that the true geniuses among us, the truly creative people in our midst, are the ones who, for reasons that no one quite understands, have not lost their magical glasses, have not become fully educated in a sense. These elite thinkers are the ones who still see the world—even if it is an adult world they now see—through the eyes of a child.

What has happened to most children in our educational systems, in modern parlance, is a failure to communicate. To be sure, part of this failure is necessary. No new educational theory, no new process or program, no new technological process (at least presently available) will negate all of the negative aspects of having to introduce so much information to so many children in what of necessity has to be a highly organized, almost regimented, manner. But we don’t have to throw all of the babies out with the bathwater. We can attempt to fight back.

Enter Terry Stickels and this book. It is a book intended to stem the loss of creativity in the educational process, grades 3 through 5, particularly in mathematics. Mr. Stickels is a highly successful and well-known creator of puzzles, one of the best we have in the country at this time. We need to only casually look at the quantity and variety of puzzles he has created to realize that he is one of those people who has a strong creative force permanently embedded and dispersed within them. He has for certain not lost that childlike ability to look at the world in new ways—and on a daily basis at that. His FRAME GAME puzzles, for example—some of which appear in this book—remind me of the way that children create words like “playdough” for “Plato” and “sourcrap” for “sauerkraut.” He is the only adult I know who I believe could compete with children in this regard. And that is a compliment. He has spent a lot of time and energy writing this book and has consulted with various knowledgeable experts concerning the mathematical content.

Advice is given elsewhere on how to use this book, but I would like to throw in my two cents’ worth also. If you are a child reading this Foreword, send Mr. Stickels an e-mail and ask him to write a more advanced book for you. If you are a teacher, a parent, or a friend of a child in the appropriate age group, go ahead and browse, browse, browse. Pick problems that pique your curiosity, ones that turn you on. You will find many. Choose ones that concern the topic of interest at the moment. You will find several. Present these to the children you are concerned with as challenges—challenges to have fun with. Do not present many at once. Even one is sufficient sometimes. And finally, be patient, very patient. Don’t always expect success.

Based on my own experiences in mathematics, I can tell you with certainty that an incorrect analysis of one puzzle, if only you will hang onto your thoughts, might well prove to be the key to solving another one, and actually might well make you appear to be a genius at some later time. No one has to know that most of your thinking came from an unsuccessful attempt with another puzzle! Getting this idea across to people in general, and to young people in particular, is difficult. But an old cliché in sports does a fairly good job of doing this: It’s not whether you win or lose that counts, but how you play the game. The follow-up, in intellectual matters especially, is that how you play the game determines how many games you win in the future.

Again, it merits pointing out that, judging from my contacts with him and the impression he gives of being a workaholic, Terry Stickels has invested an enormous amount of time, physical labor, and highly skilled creative thinking in producing this book. More so than perhaps we realize. Based on numerous conversations with him, I can vouch for the fact he passionately cares about the American educational system. Let’s give the gentleman a chance to do what he can with the puzzles he presents here. Here’s hoping that this is not the last publication we see from him concerning the training of our young people in mathematics.

February 2009

Dr. Harvy BakerDepartment of Mathematics University of Texas at Arlington

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the work and suggestions of the following people:

Mr. Sam Bellotto Jr. of CROSSDOWN.COMMs. Terry Baughan of TALLROSE PRODUCTIONSMs. Shelley Hazard of PUZZLERSPARADISE.COMMr. Barry Finnen of PHYSICS247.COMWebmaster Mr. Roger Smith Mr. Robert Webb of SOFTWARE3D.COMMs. Suzanne Alejandre of THE MATH FORUM@DREXELMr. Martin Gardner Mr. Casey Shaw of USA WEEKEND magazine Mr. Brendan Burford of KING FEATURESMs. Kelsey Flower Mr. Alex Stickels

Finally—a special thanks to my right hand and the person who makes all this happen, Ms. Christy Davis, owner of Executive Services, Arlington, Texas.

About This Book

Puzzles and brainteasers are fun ways to get kids enjoying and thinking about math. The “thinking smart” puzzles in this book are designed to sharpen the creativity and problem-solving skills, as well as the mathematics content skills, of students in grades 3 through 5.

The design for the book includes the following objectives:

• Offer a panoramic approach to the thinking skills that kids need to excel in math

• Incorporate a broad spectrum of different kinds of puzzles

• Meet the grade-appropriate guidelines set forth by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics

• Venture into content areas where previous math/thinking skills books have not gone

• Be challenging, but also offer lots of fun along the way

The puzzles are easy, medium, and difficult, but none are so designated. What one student will find easy, another may find difficult, and vice versa. A difficulty rating also might be intimidating to some students—and interpreted as a good reason for not solving a puzzle—the opposite of the book’s purpose.

The range of puzzles incorporates multiple approaches to skill building, including numerical manipulation, spatial/visual problems, and language arts exercises. There is no one “best” pathway to solving each puzzle, and often there are numerous entry points to finding solutions. Students invariably will find the way, using a mix of intuition and thinking skills that are uniquely their own.

The Author

Terry Stickels is dedicated to helping people improve their mental flexibility and creative problem-solving capabilities through puzzles—and making it fun. His books, calendars, card decks, and newspaper columns are filled with clever and challenging exercises that stretch the minds of even the best thinkers. And he especially enjoys creating puzzles for kids.

Terry is well known for his internationally syndicated columns. FRAME GAMES, appearing in USA WEEKEND magazine, is read by more than 48 million people in six hundred newspapers weekly. STICKELERS, published daily by King Features, appears in several of the largest newspapers in America, including the Washington Post, the Chicago-Sun Times, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Terry is also the featured puzzle columnist for The Guardian in London—the United Kingdom’s largest newspaper.

As a highly popular public speaker, Terry’s keynote addresses are fast-paced, humorous looks at the ability (and sometimes the lack thereof) to think clearly. Distinguished authorities such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics also praise his work as important in assisting students to learn how to think critically and sharpen their problem-solving skills.

Born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, Terry was given his first puzzle book at age eleven. Fascinated by the book’s mind-bending playfulness, he soon was inventing puzzles on his own—lots of them. He attended the University of Nebraska at Omaha on a football scholarship, and while he was at UNO tutoring students in math and physics, he saw the advantages of using puzzles to turbocharge understanding of several concepts within those disciplines.

After several years as an occasionally published creator of puzzles, Terry was asked to produce a weekly column for a twelve-newspaper syndicate in Rochester, New York. Two years later, his puzzles caught the attention of Sterling Publishing in New York, and his first book, MINDSTRETCHING PUZZLES, became an immediate hit and is selling well to this day. Twenty-five more puzzle books have followed, three of them sponsored by the high-IQ society MENSA.

Terry lives in Fort Worth, Texas, where he is working on his next generation of puzzles to once again captivate, challenge, and delight his worldwide readership.

Introduction

This book contains more than 300 puzzles, ranging from relatively easy logic challenges to more difficult math brainteasers, requiring math skills ranging from addition and subtraction to determining probability and algebraic thinking. Within these pages you will find these types of puzzles:

Mathematical Spatial/Visual Logical Analytical Reasoning Word PuzzlesFrame Games Cryptograms Analogies Sequence Sudoku

By design I have included a large number and broad spectrum of puzzles, providing teachers and learners with multiple options. These are organized into parts devoted to numbers and operations; geometry and measurement; mathematical reasoning; and algebra, statistics, and probability. This arrangement will facilitate the instructor’s ability to enhance areas of the curriculum that are most appropriate, adding richness, change of pace, and reinforcement to the teaching/learning process.

Some Puzzle -Solving Tips

Puzzle solving is sometimes like mathematical problem solving, but sometimes you have to move away from the more standard approaches when working on puzzles. Think about the puzzles from different perspectives and with a sense of play. Consider some of the following:

• Can the puzzle be solved by breaking it down into simpler components?

• Are there patterns that repeat often enough to suggest a prediction for “what comes next”?

• A puzzle may have one or more answers.

• Try thinking of ways to “twist, bend, separate, or spin” the puzzle. What does it look like “backward, forward, upside down, and sideways”?

• Does your answer make sense? Can you plug your answer back into the question to satisfy all the parameters?

• If your answer seems strange or unlikely, it may well be correct. The answers to puzzles are often surprising!

• Don’t worry about how you might be seen if you can’t solve the puzzle. We all make mistakes, and no one can answer every question. Just relax, have a good time, and never worry about other people’s opinions.

Projects throughout the book marked with asymbol can be done using easy-to-find manipulatives, such as coins, blocks, and cut paper, to help learners who may have trouble visualizing some of the puzzles.

You may wonder why some language arts puzzles are included in a math puzzle book. Actually, puzzles and problems such as analogies and analytical reasoning that are more “language arts” in nature promote and augment critical-thinking skills. Take the FRAME GAMES, for example. FRAME GAMES