Math Fun: More Ways Than You Can Count

If you want to convert five Australian dollars to another currency, how many Egyptian pounds or Belgian francs would you receive? That's the kind of brain-teasing number question people seem to delight in posing on the World Wide Web. When you add the interactive nature of the Internet to its worldwide reach, you multiply the number of ways your students can have fun while learning math. Visit the International Wildlife Coalition site and your class can have a whale of a good time figuring out math problems about how much a baby whale drinks.

The Web's visual capabilities make it a superb place for kids to learn about shapes and patterns, as your class will discover when you create paper flexagons.

The Web can make math activities not only a feast for the eyes, but the ears as well, as you will know when you explore the relationship between music and patterns. Another way to show there's plenty in a number is to check out today's date, where you can find out interesting and odd facts about the numerals of each date. Has all this surfing worked up your appetite? Well, your class can price the cost of a meal in the U.S. and figure out what it would cost in different countries, courtesy of the Universal Currency Converter.

International Wildlife Coalitions's Whales of the World Education Program
http://www.iwc.org/

Flexagons
http://www.kathrynhuxtable.org/
cgi-bin/home/flexagon/

MusiNum—The Music in the Numbers
http://www.philtulga.com
/PatternActivities.html#03

About today's date
http://richardphillips.org.uk
/number/

Universal Currency Converter
http://www.xe.net/ucc