The Activities
- Topic: Zero, Mathematical Operations: Book: Zero the Hero, by Holub. This is a very funny book about Zero feeling left out and useless until the Roman Numerals attack. The kids loved the jokes in the book, but it was bit long (took 15 minutes to read).
- Topic: Logic. We played the game Logic Links. The kids used Unifix cubes instead of chips, so we would have enough cubes for each kid to solve the puzzle on their own.
- Topic: Symmetry, Snowflakes. Each kid folded and cut out three snowflakes from this book:
How did it go?
We had 4 kids this week. It was a pretty easy circle, with nothing too challenging. The kids all loved the book, and really LOVED the snowflakes.
Logic Links
In this game you take 4 or 5 chips of different colors, and then read a couple clues from a card to figure out what order they belong in. For example, the blue chip is on the far left, or the orange chips are not touching.
We did the puzzles in order, but the early ones were too easy so we started skipping ahead by 4 or 5 puzzles after we solved each one. The trickiest part of these puzzles was remembering which side is the left vs the right, especially since kids were sitting across the table from each other, so their lefts and rights were reversed.
After 10 or so puzzles, we skipped to puzzle #150, but we had to solve it together because we needed to use the board because the pieces needed to be in a particular circle. We successfully solved it together, but some kids were disappointed they didn’t get to do it on their own.
Snowflakes
Everyone loved these snowflakes, and begged to do more, so we ended up doing more snowflakes and skipping the last activity I had planned.
Vickrey Math Circle 