Math Links for Week Ending Apr. 21st, 2017

One of the newest type of activities that we are starting to make a lot of is a continuum for student practice and review. It's basically a tricky way to do a worksheet. In this case it is operations with fractions for grade 7 (adding & subtracting and multiplication & division with whole numbers).  The premiss is this: there are seven envelopes. Each envelope has cards with 10 questions. As you move from one envelope to the other the questions become incrementally more difficult. Students have to do the first 5 questions on each card. If they get those correct then the go to the next card, if not they do more on the same one. And to make it a bit more fun we have answer cards for them to check with a UV pen and invisible ink.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8
http://engaging-math.blogspot.ca/2017/04/fraction-operation-continuum.html

Here's a neat little Desmos Activity from @id_rms1 to get kids into the idea of multiplying a fraction by a whole number. Once they are done that then then can use this Mathies virtual manipulative on pouring liquid.
Curriculum Tags Gr7
https://teacher.desmos.com/activitybuilder/custom/58e591496c284b0f4c79e4c2





Looking for things for your students to think critically about? Then look no further than criticalmath.ca. The site has many posts with examples of things to get your students to think and is currently being run by @matthewoldridge.
Curriculum Tags: All
https://criticalmath.ca/2017/04/13/oil-is-cheaper-than-milk-and-water-wbmarkmelin-sbmatthewoldridge/

I always like these patterning problems where there are many interpretations of how the pattern grows. Check out the post for more on this. Thanks to @msbjacobs and @AllenMath for this one.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM2D, MFM2P
http://themathguy.blogspot.ca/2017/04/joyous-maths-dans-favourite-pattern.html

Though this article is a few years old, I don't think we can have enough info about helping students with learning disabilities. In this case, heuristics, math anxiety and more. Thanks to @KMarkPet for this one.
Curriculum Tags: All
https://www.ldatschool.ca/math/math-heuristics/

The next time I get a chance to talk about order of operations I'm gonna talk about this. Apparently this professor has written every three digit number as an expression using only one digit and order of operations. For example: 931 = 33 + 33 × 3³ + 3 + 3 + 3/3. Watch this @numberphile video from @standupmaths with more on this and even something similar with numbers less than 11,111.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8. MPM1D, MFM1P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ruC5A9EzzE

Some data on Scrabble scores (especially now with words like Qi and Za)
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-qi-and-za-changed-scrabble/

And more movie based data. This time about the four types of Scarlett Johansson movies
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-four-types-of-scarlett-johansson-movies/