I got an email from a college friend about their kid Sam…

Ahoy Big Sam!

I have a question regarding Lil Sam. 

He’s big on math. 

Like big big. 

Do your colleagues in the lower school / primary school have a list of resources for self-directed math exploration for the youth?

Or even applied math via games etc so its more play / exploration vs workbooks?

It got to the point that he was asking us to come up with math questions that we just bought a stack of workbooks but those feel like work and less development of interest and joy. 

Now I don’t know anything about little kids. But I love that my friend wasn’t looking for workbooks and was more interested in “joy” and “play.” Below are what I’m going to recommend to my friend, but I think would be a useful list for any kid in pre-Kindergarten to grade 5.

Beast Academy: I remember another college friend reached out years ago with a similar question, and I turned to the online math teacher community and pretty universally I got “Beast Academy” as an answer over and over again.

I reached out to a kindergarten teacher who I adore (I mean, she plays board games with me). I once told her how much I was loving Tracy Zager’s book Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You’d Had even though it was written for elementary school teachers, and she picked it up and read it! So she’s quality people. I also reached out to our lower school math coach. Both said the same thing:

Tang Math: especially the summer challenges.

Then I reached out to my new math teacher community on Mathstodon, and got additional suggestions:

MathPickle: I went to this site and loved it, and there is a link to a super fun activity book called the “Infinite Pickle” and upon quick browsing, I’m excited by it! And tons of puzzles! There’s also a page with lots of suggested board games and at the top of that page, it reads “#1 job for parents: establish a culture of board gaming in the home.” You know I’m a fan of board games, so I’m into all of this.

DragonBox Numbers game: not only did I hear about this online, but I went to a Desmos Fellows Conference a couple weeks ago and a few elementary school teachers were raving about this over lunch one day. So I heard about this twice in a few weeks when I had never heard about it before! Also, one can learn chess, apparently, with DragonBox chess and that was recommeded too.

Math For Love, of course! I’ve known about this site for years, with all the rich tasks and games (like Tiny Polka Dot!). There are lesson openers, rich tasks, and games (all sortable by grade level!).

Yokaku puzzles were recommended and were a new type of puzzle to me, and I think these are designed to build number sense and fluency — and can be written from the youngest students to the oldest students (like I saw some things I could use in my high school classes!).

Math Games with Bad Drawings is an awesome book by Ben Orlin (which might have my name in it, in a very tiny endnote) which is chock full of games (most new) that involve very little other than pencil and paper and maybe an occasional coin or paperclip) that I absolutely know I would use with my own children if I had any. Plus I think my friend who asked for suggestions would love reading the book (the prose is humorous) to get the games to teach his kids.

The easier levels of Area Mazes and Strimko puzzles were also thrown out there. I hadn’t heard of these types of puzzles, but when I googled, of course the great Sarah Carter comes to the rescue with really informative pages both on Area Mazes and Strimko puzzles.

Lastly, as I was putting together this post, I remembered two more resources that might be helpful to my friend. Kent Haines’ website Games for Young Minds and Christopher Danielson’s Talking Math With Your Kids. Both are deliciously wonderful. I definitely have bought the books “How Many?” and “Which One Doesn’t Belong” along with many fun play tiles from Christopher Danielson’s shop and highly recommend them.

I figure this post can be my personal repository if anyone asks for fun math enrichment on the pre-K to 5 level. But PLEASE leave a comment if you have any additional suggestions! I’m always looking for things to expand my knolwedge of cool math resources.

UPDATE: Ahhhh, I can’t believe I forgot this. At the Desmos Fellows Conference, the TV show on netflix Numberblocks came up a few times! And there’s a youtube channel. I even watched a few episodes with my niece and nephew and I really enjoyed them. (I think they were less excited about it because they’re older and we started with the very first episode.)

UPDATE 2: My friend who works for Illustrative Math said their “IM math centers” could be useful too! She expanded: “Go to link, navigate to a grade, find the tab that says “Centers” and poke around. I’ve heard they can be a bit hard to navigate at first just because there are a lot of them, and each one has ‘stages’ of increasing complexity. But if you download any set of blackline masters, the directions are written on them in kid-friendly language. Primary teachers sometimes mean different things by ‘centers’ but I take it to mean an activity that kids can do without adult supervision to practice or work on number sense.”