Here are some ways that you might use Math Munch with your students. You can sprinkle it into your classroom like seasoning or make it a staple in your routine. We’ve used all of these approaches at different times and with different emphases. We’re sure that the ways we use Math Munch will continue to evolve and that you’ll find your own ways that work for you and your students.
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For yourself!
We feel like one of the most important things we do for our students is to immerse ourselves in mathematics and to always be learning. To this end, you could visit Math Munch from time to time to pick up some new tidbit or enthusiasm. You could subscribe by email or RSS to find out when the new weekly post is up. You could use our posts and pages as sources of inspiration for your classroom activities. In particular, we often feature arts-and-crafts projects that are related to mathematics that you could bring into your classroom.
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The occassional recommendation.
You could mention Math Munch to your students in one-off kinds of way as occasions arise—pulling up a post that’s relevant to your current topic of study; pointing out the site to students as something that they might enjoy pursuing on their own time; pointing it out as an accessible resource for a project they’re working on; or using it as a spill-over-time activity for when some students have finished work and need something to do while others are still completing it.
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Enrichment outside of class.
Math Munch could also find a place in your after-school programs, your math club, or your rainy-day recesses.
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Poster as springboard.
Just by placing our poster on the wall of your classroom , you could invite your students to explore the mathematical internet. This is an easy and fun way to bring Math Munch into your classroom.
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A weekly classroom feature.
You could build our weekly posts into your classroom routine. You could take a few minutes to share and summarize the new post in class each week; get kids interested to the point where they might go looking at it on their own; see what questions and ideas that the posts prompt for them.
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A weekly immersion.
You could ask you students to visit Math Munch as a weekly homework assignment; have them compose a short piece of reflective writing about it, or to make some other response to the post—like constructing a shape, creating a maze, or trying a game. A more structured approach would be to give your students a reflection sheet of reading questions to guide their encounter of a post.
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A place for mathematical community.
As a class (or individually), your students could compose comments to submit as responses to our posts, as a reflection and writing exercise. In addition, the mathematicians we post about often agree to answer questions for interviews! This could open up a line of communication between your class and the amazing people that we feature. Finally, we’d love to hear from you and your students and are happy to take suggestions for post content.
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A place for mathematical writing.
To highlight one theme: if your school or you yourself find value in writing across the curriculum, Math Munch can be a great source of writing prompts—as a source of images and videos for warm-up writing exercises, as part of weekly journal entries, or for composing comments in response to posts.
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A public place to share math.
Finally, we’re launching a Reader’s Gallery where we’ll display creations that readers send in that are inspired by what they read on Math Munch. (In consideration of privacy, we’ll include the amount of identifying information that you request.) We’d love to see what your students create, and we’re sure they’d get a kick out of having their work shared on the site!