Scientist/Mathematician
Many traditional ways of teaching and learning are typically easily accessed by the Scientist/Mathematician child. Even so, you can extend what your child is doing at school, and support your child to branch into less favored areas with these activities & resources.
- Make a sets of index cards with the numbers 1-20 (positive and negative) for each player. To play, have each player turn over their top two cards and either add or subtract them, trying to get the highest number (don’t forget to factor in the negative numbers). Verify who has the highest number—that person gets to keep the cards.
- Build off the above game by having each player turn over only 1 card per round. The first player to correctly announce the product of the numbers wins the cards.
- Want to foster your child’s skill with exponents? Using a regular deck of cards, divide the cards evenly among the players. Have each player flip over 2 cards. The first one is the number base, the second is that number’s exponent (e.g., if they turn over a 5 and then a 4, they are trying to figure out what 5 to the 4th is). The player with the highest number multiplied out wins all the cards of that round.
- What about family BINGO? You can make cards with numbers in each of the squares. Have your child come up with 3-4 different equations that will give each of the numbers on the boards as the answer. Mix up the cards and call these out instead of the traditional “B19.” The person who covers 5 in a row, or the four corners, or the whole card first, wins.
- Give your child a “fun budget,” contingent on her being able to put together a mathematical proposal that correctly lists out how they will spend the money, and on what (be sure they include sales tax!).\
- With your child’s proclivity for logic, extend her thinking by helping her analyze the motivations or reasons behind current events or historical occurrences. This will extend your child’s higher order thinking skills and prepare her for essay writing and research papers.
- Angry Bird Angles: Let your child use clip art of angry bird characters and structures. Have them put together a 2-D angry bird launch scene (bird in catapult, ready to aim for the structures to knock down). With whatever design she creates, have her tell you the angle she would need to “launch” her clip art bird for it to successfully hit the buildings in her picture. Have her draw lines on her scene demonstrating this.
- Online resources:
- For some tough deductive problems, see http://www.expandyourmind.com/logicproblems/logic_lateral.shtml.
- Have your child try out these tricky puzzles at: http://www.puzzlepixies.com/impossible/.
- To foster your child’s logical thinking and categorization abilities, try this online game: http://www.thekidzpage.com/learninggames/logic_games/logic-game-petcenter.html.
- Wondervillle is a fun interactive site to gain knowledge, confidence, and expertise…while thinking creatively and having fun!: http://www.wonderville.ca/.
- To explore more math options, have your child check out http://www.youtube.com/user/sciencefix http://www.mathtv.com/videos_by_topic or http://www.khanacademy.org/.
- Scientific thinkers will love these online CSI adventures! http://forensics.rice.edu/index.html
- Want a math game? Spin the wheel! http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/mathsfile/gameswheel.html
- There are so many amazing real-life images of cells and organisms at Cells Alive: http://www.cellsalive.com/
- http://www.coolmath-games.com/ is many teacher’s go-to site for interactive educational math games. Have your child check it out!
- For a number of vetted science resources across the net, check out http://www.scibermonkey.org/.
- Your Scientist/Mathematician will not be able to resist this fun blood typing interactive: http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/landsteiner/landsteiner.html
- http://numbergossip.com/ is a fun site for math lovers: simply enter a number and learn “everything you wanted to know about the number but were afraid to ask.”
- To extend your child’s enjoyment of math outside of school, the National Council of Teacher's of Mathematics has a fun site that helps enhance problem solving skills: http://www.figurethis.org/index.html.
