TED Talks

TED Talks are a great way for older students to expose themselves to current events, learn about recent advancements in science and technology, and gain new perspectives about the world around them, the people who live in it, and how ongoing change will effect both the Earth and its citizens.

Recreational Mathematics

Do you find math fun? For most people, the answer is either 'no' or 'no, man' or even 'heck no.' But if you're someone like me and love all those beautiful lines of equations, you might want to check out this site about recreational mathematics. I found the resources about Möbius strips particularly entertaining.

Science Fair Project Ideas

Are you looking for an idea for your school's next science fair? Science Buddies can help. Just enter your grade level and answer a short questionnaire about your interests and hobbies, and you'll be presented with a list of fun science fair projects specially chosen just for you.

You can also check out their blog for weekly science experiments you can do right at home with your friends or family. If you're looking to pursue a career in science or engineering, Science Buddies can help you browse through and narrow down your options and see a sneak peek of what the future could have in store for you.

More Free Math Worksheets

At Math-Drills.com, you can find thousands of worksheets on a wide variety of topics from simple computations to algebra, geometry, and statistics. After selecting a general topic to study, you will be taken to a list of sub-topics and their accompanying worksheets. Each worksheet has several different versions, which is ideal if you need a little extra practice.

For students in Kindergarten through Grade 5, k5learning.com has a range of free worksheets on various math, grammar, and reading comprehension topics.

You can also find a ton of free math worksheets, video lessons, games, and activities for students in 1st through 7th grade at this website.

Real World Math Practice

Unless you're planning to become an engineer, scientist, accountant, or mathematician, you've probably sat through at least one math lesson wondering when you were going to be using this in the real world. And, to be honest, unless you're going to pursue one of the above-mentioned professions, the answer is probably either 'never' or 'rarely enough that you'll end up googling it rather than remembering all these complicated formulas.'

But that doesn't mean that we should scrap math class the minute we master 2 + 2. For starters, higher math like algebra and geometry comes in very handy in high school and college physics and chemistry classes. And as you've probably already figured out, science is essential in understanding the world around us. If you're still rolling your eyes and thinking that gravity would work regardless of whether you understood it or not, you're right. Gravity worked for billions of years before we came along, and it'll keep on working long after we're gone. But knowing about gravity is important for the same reason that any piece of knowledge is important - because it allows you to make connections to other bits of knowledge, which helps you solve problems and think up brand new ideas, which is important whether you're going to be a rocket scientist or an office worker or a manual laborer.

Okay, back to the point. The typical American is never going to do a single algebra problem after their College Math 101 final exam. However, you're still going to be doing a lot of math. If you plan on using money, paying taxes, following recipes, shopping for food and clothes, owning a house or a car, renting a flat, taking out a loan, opening a bank account, paying bills, or going furniture shopping, you're going to have to do a bit of math.

If you're an elementary school student looking to improve your math skills, try taking those skills out into the real world. Take a look at a recipe book or just google 'recipes' and see if you can figure out how much of each ingredient you'd need if you were cooking for two people, or three, or five. Hunt for coupons in your local newspaper and see how much you'd save if you were to use it to purchase something. Go grocery shopping with your guardian and see if you can estimate how much the total will be. Look at two different brands or sizes of the same item and calculate the price per ounce/pound/liter and see what the better deal is. Measure a regular shape in your house and calculate its surface area and volume. Add up everything you drink in a day and calculate the ratio of milk to water or juice or soda, and find what percentage each beverage makes up of your daily fluid intake.

Ultimately, the best way to get better at math is to practice. This is true of most things in life. If you want to be a better reader, read more. If you need to learn to ride a bike, practice until you spend more time pedaling than crashing and falling off. If you're looking to speak a new language, the only way to get better at speaking is by actually talking.

So get out there and practice! And if you can't exactly 'get out' because of Mother Nature's snowy gifts, you can start by calculating how many more days of winter we have to endure before we can all step outside without becoming a human popsicle.

Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha is an amazing search engine that serves as an advanced calculator, online dictionary, and virtual database of people, events, statistics, countries, nutritional information, weather, maps, science, art, technology, and more. To see examples of what you can look up with Wolfram Alpha, click here. Follow this link to go straight to the search engine itself. 

The search engine is free, but if you'd like to take it on the go with you, you can download the Wolfram Alpha app for your tablet or smart phone for a small fee.

Free K-5 Math Workbooks

At The Math Learning Center, you can download hundreds of pages worth of free material to help your student succeed.

Just click on the links below, select your child's grade level, and click 'download.' A PDF file will open up, and you will find various activities and worksheets if you scroll down about 20 or 30 pages.

Bridges Collection of Activities and Worksheets

Practice Books (Please note that these have not been revised to align to the current Common Core standards.)

Problem Solving with Story Boxes for Grades K-2

Introduction to the "beauty and excitement" of math for grades 3 and 4

Lessons and Activities:

• Kindergarten
• 1st Grade
• 2nd Grade
• 3rd Grade
• 4th Grade
• 5th Grade

I also found a free publication about becoming a better math tutor that I will be browsing through later today.

Tips for Solving Word Problems

With the new Common Core standards, word problems are becoming trickier and more common than ever. It's vital that you learn how to pull out the important information and figure out what the question is asking you to do even in the most complicated of word problems.

• If you have a worksheet, workbook, quiz, or test that you're allowed to write on, take full advantage of it. Use a combination of underlining, circling, and boxing in to separate the different parts of the word problem and highlight important information. Just make sure that you don't underline the entire thing. If you're going to do that, you may as well just leave it as is. The whole point of marking up the question is to find the important parts, so it's not going to help you if you mark everything as important. 
• Figure out what the question wants you to do. Sometimes, it'll ask you to do more than one thing and sometimes it'll try to confuse you by adding extra steps you need to do before arriving at your final answer. You can lose points fast if the question asks you to round your answer or convert it from feet to inches and you leave it as is. You might want to star the question so it'll stand out on your page. 
• Break it down into steps. Ask yourself what you need to do first. What comes after that? What's my third step, etc, etc? If you have enough time and you're really struggling with a problem, you might want to partially rewrite it and label each part so it's clearer to you. 
• Make sure you final answer is circled/underlined/boxed in/on the line provided. If you just did three computations to get at your answer, your test grader might not know which one is your final answer. 
• Check your work. Make sure you didn't make any silly errors, like adding instead of subtracting or writing a 9 instead of a 6. Also ask yourself if your answer makes sense in the real world. If the question asks you to find out how much Lily spent for three tomatoes and you get an answer of 90 dollars or two cents, you probably made a mistake somewhere. 
• You can also check your answer by working backwards. If you want to make sure you completed a division problem correctly, multiply the quotient (the answer you got) by the divisor (the number you divided by) to make sure you can arrive back at the original dividend (the number you divided, also known as the number under the little house in long division). 

K-12 Math Worksheets

Math Worksheets Land is a great resource for math students of all ages. Whether you missed a lesson or you're trying to study for an upcoming quiz, Math Worksheets Land has the answer. You can sort worksheets by grade-level or by topic. The site is very straight-forward to navigate and will provide you with a guided lesson and two worksheets for every topic. If you know where your weak areas are in math, this can be a great resource to help you target them and turn them into strengths.

You can got a lot of free content on the site, but you might want to consider paying for full access if you're an educator. With a site subscription, you'll unlock answer keys, three homework sheets for each topic, three quizzes for each topic, three addition practice sheets for each topic, and a variety of tests for each grade level.

Collection of Online Interactives

Check out this collection of educational interactives from all over the Internet. They're meant mainly for students in grades K-5, but I have to confess that I had fun clicking around the site too. The site hosts links to science, math, ELA, social studies, music, art, and Spanish interactives and is very easy to navigate, so I'm sure that it'll be a breeze to find exactly what you want to learn about.

TED Talks

TED Talks online gives learners from all over the globe access to innovative talks given from the world's premier experts. The Talks range from subtly humorous to jaw-droppingly beautiful to awe-inspiringly ingenious. The Talks range in duration from five minutes to just over a half hour, so you can fit them into your morning train commute, your mid-morning coffee break, your lunch hour, or your late afternoon snack time. High schoolers and adult learners would likely get the most out of this resource, but middle schoolers can feel free to take a peek around as well.

Khan Academy

A while back, one of our readers suggested that we add Khan Academy to our list of resources.

Khan Academy offers an amazing variety of learning resources. Students can brush up on their math or science skills, learn about economics and finance, dive into the world of computer programing, prep for the Big Test, or access partner content offered by world-renowned museums.

Khan Academy is an awesome resource for learners of all ages. Kindergartners through college students can benefit from using Khan Academy, as can their caregivers and teachers. Adult learners can enjoy these resources as well. Whether you're 5 or 125, Khan Academy will help you learn something new.

Last Minute Test Prep: NYS Math Test

If you're worried about not doing well tomorrow, try taking a practice test to gauge how well you will do tomorrow. Answers are included in each document below.

Grade 3 NYS Math Practice Test: http://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attachments/grade_3_math_released_questions.pdf

Grade 4 NYS Math Practice Test: http://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attachments/grade_4_math_released_questions.pdf

Grade 5 NYS Math Practice Test: http://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attachments/grade_5_math_released_questions.pdf

Grade 6 NYS Math Practice Test: http://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attachments/grade_6_math_released_questions.pdf

Grade 7 NYS Math Practice Test: http://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attachments/grade_7_math_released_questions.pdf

Grade 8 NYS Math Practice Test: http://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attachments/grade_8_math_released_questions.pdf

Tips for Taking the Test: Math Edition

With the NYS Math Exam coming up tomorrow, you might be looking for some tips for taking the test. If so, you've come to the right place!

• Stay focused. Nothing matters (for a few hours at least) except for the test.
• If permitted, use a calculator to avoid silly mistakes.
• At the end of the test, take time to make sure that your answers are legible (easily read). You can lose easy points if the grader can't understand what you've written.
• Show all of your work, even if you used a calculator. You can lose points for not doing so.
• For the multiple choice section of the test, do all work and computations/calculations before checking out the four answers. This will help you avoid careless mistakes. If none of the answer choices correspond to the answer you calculated, follow these steps:
• Make sure you've read the problem carefully. Did you miss a step? Did you add when you needed to subtract? Did you do step two first instead of step one?
• Re-do the problem. 
• If you still get the same answer, choose the answer choice that makes the most sense - generally the one closest to the answer you calculated.
• Look for key words in the problem. If the problem says to estimate, don't do an exact calculation! 
• Make sure your answer makes sense. Sometimes the test-makers will try to fool you with units that don't make sense, decimals in the wrong place, etc. 
• Pace yourself. Don't rush, but leave yourself enough time to finish as many questions as possible.
• For the second and third parts of the test, you might come across a question (or a few) asking you to explain how you arrived at an answer. Make sure you remember to include every step in your answer. 
• Answer every question. If you need to skip a question, make sure you go back to it.
• Don't spend too much time on one question. 
• Try not to guess. If you have to guess, cross off one or two answer choices first, then make an educated guess. 
• Believe in yourself. You're going to do fine. You've learned everything on the test already! 
• Don't stress yourself out tonight, or the morning before the test. If you're going to study, stick to vocabulary and/or reviewing key ideas you know that you've had trouble with throughout the year.
• Remember that I believe in you too! Good luck! 

Big Ideas Math Online Textbooks

Check out this link for the complete list of online textbooks: http://www.bigideasmath.com/students/?free=1

6th Grade: http://www.bigideasmath.com/students/?level=7.00

7th Grade: http://www.bigideasmath.com/students/?level=8.00

8th Grade: http://www.bigideasmath.com/students/?level=9.00

Algebra I: http://www.bigideasmath.com/students/?level=10.00

These resources can help you prepare for the upcoming state tests, brush up on subjects you've been struggling with, or catch up on lessons you've missed.

Math Review From Big Ideas Math

Below are two very cool resources that you can use to prepare for the upcoming math state exams.

Skills Review Handbook: http://www.bigideasmath.com/protected/content/dcs_cc2/srh/index.html

Basic Skills Handbook: http://www.bigideasmath.com/protected/content/dcs_cc2/bsh/index.html

Short SAT Math Review

Below is a concise review of everything you need to know for the mathematics portion of the SAT.

http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/sat-mathematics-review.pdf

SAT Math Essential Review

With a pre-test, three practice tests, and a comprehensive review of every math concept you need to know for the SAT, this review will help you identify what you need to work on and hone your SAT math skills to perfection.

http://papers.xtremepapers.com/SAT/Math%20Essentials.pdf

Math Workbooks and Vocabulary for K-5

You can find grade- and age- appropriate math resources at the link below. There are two workbook volumes for each grade, in addition to a vocabulary sheet and a fun 'homework' book that can also be used to practice math skills.

http://www.iusd.org/student_resources/mathematics.html

Pearson Resources

Interactive math videos, worksheets, and textbook resources: http://www.phschool.com/atschool/txtbk_res_math.html

ELA: http://www.phschool.com/atschool/txtbk_res_la.html

Science (Choose your state and a topic): http://www.phschool.com/atschool/txtbk_res_sci.html

Social Studies (Choose your state and a topic): http://www.phschool.com/atschool/txtbk_res_ss.html

Foreign Languages (Primarily Spanish): http://www.phschool.com/atschool/txtbk_res_fl.html

Other, including driving and life skills: http://www.phschool.com/atschool/txtbk_res_ct.html

You can find videos, lessons, links, and much more within these links. If you are having trouble with a topic, click on an applicable textbook and explore the links and videos provided under that topic's headings and subheadings. This is a great way to study for the state tests coming up.