-Kelly Harmon, Randi Anderson, & Ashley Taplin

As we have sheltered in place here, I have found some great activities to keep my boys' little minds and bodies busy. Many are simple daily activities that we do and consider to be "adult things". Now, my kids (6 & 3 years old) are doing them right alongside me.

We have been

• Baking two days a week
• Planting a vegetable graden
• Jumping on the trampoline
• Playing board games at night as a family
• Eating dinner together
• And much more!

Early Childhood

• Put on a sock Puppet Show
• Make Slime
• Play Freeze Dance
• Have an Egg and Spoon Race
• Learn the Continents Song
• Read Aloud to a Stuffed Animal

• Create a Meme using Kapwing
• Mow the lawn
• Plant a garden
• Create a workout routine and exercise!
• Build a monthly budget
• Plan the next family vacation using Trip Advisor
• Write a Yelp review for a local restaurant
• Watch Youtube videos about a career you would like to have
• Grab a good book and read outside
• Make up and video a dance routine
• Bake a new treat in the kitchen
• Research a topic of interest using Wonderopolis

Open Middle

Open Middle is one of my favorite resources for increasing engagement and deepening learning as the questions “generally require a higher Depth of Knowledge than most problems that assess procedural and conceptual understanding.” Each problem includes the following:

• a “closed beginning” meaning that they all start with the same initial problem.
• a “closed end” meaning that they all end with the same answer.
• an “open middle” meaning that there are multiple ways to approach and ultimately solve the problem.

(Source: https://www.openmiddle.com/)

The site features free grade level problems K-12 on various topics and are easy to screenshot and share with students on paper or on a digital platform such as Google Classroom. I also love to further the learning by asking students what strategies they used to solve the problem and invite students to discuss similarities/differences as a class. Below are a couple problems from Geometry and Algebra I, and if you would like to see a digital task card version I created click here.

Finally, I recently had the opportunity to hear Dr. Jo Boaler speak about enriching our math curriculum with more open ended, real world applications. She presented a new resource from her work with Youcubed called Data Science found here:

https://www.youcubed.org/resource/data-literacy/. These tasks and ideas offer students the opportunity to think critically about the world around them and relate it to math. In her work, she finds that when “math [is] open, creative and visual…such activities not only offer deep engagement, new understandings, and visual brain activity, but they show students that mathematics can be an open and beautiful subject, rather than a fixed, closed and impenetrable subject” (https://www.youcubed.org/resource/data-literacy/). I love this reminder of what math is and how we can make it come alive for our students!