Every week in July, we’ll bring the parents of Beijing their very own summer camp curriculum. We’re keeping it truly simple, uncomplicated, and as inexpensive as possible so choose activities a la carte or follow the entire week’s agenda – whatever helps!

This week our theme is Natural Shapes, and here is the schedule:

Monday: Shapes and Math review

• The website Math is Fun has an excellent Geometry page that allows kids to review shapes, no matter their age or education level.
• Have your kids go around the house and find all the circles, all the squares, all the triangles, etc., and line them up by size.
• Then ask pointed questions such as, how many triangles make a square? What’s the difference between a square and a rectangle? And so on…
• Make your own shape stencils out of cardboard to trace. What animals can you make out of shapes?
• Pair activities with these songs:

Tuesday: Nature Walk

• Take a look at this list of Beijing parks and outdoor spaces where you can picnic and spend time on the grass.
• Pack a fun lunch with a mix of nutritional and simple snacks, and lots of water!
• Head to a park with a small picnic basket, sunscreen, and reusable bag where you can store your nature treasures.
• Set the ground rule that it’s okay to take a nature treasure if it’s “found on the ground,” but not off trees, plants, bushes, etc.
• Challenge your child/ren to point out shapes they see in nature: Does that tree look like a triangle? Is a bush a rectangle? How many rocks are ovals and how many circles? How do different shapes stack on top of one another?
• Most of all, enjoy your time in nature together.

Wednesday: Shapes in Nature (craft)

• Choose from some excellent nature crafts based on your kid’s interests and the treasures that you find! Below is an example:
  A Beautiful Nature Frame by Little Pine Learners
• Choose an assortment of lovely rocks. Take them home and rinse them, then clean them with soap and water, rinse them again, and let them dry. Paint happy messages on each rock and leave them out in nature for other friends to find!

Thursday: Make a Face/Find a Face

• Now, choose a different location for a walk and find faces in nature: These can be a rock face that has eyes, a building nearby that looks like it’s smiling. Really, the possibilities are as vast as Beijing itself.
• Then take your nature treasures (always “found on the ground) and make faces for other people to find!

Friday: Math in Nature

• Concentric circles are everywhere, flowers follow the Fibonacci sequence. Simply put, fractals, hexagons, and just plain symmetry are all math concepts prevalent in nature. Read this article from Children’s Discovery Museum and wander your neighborhood looking for math in natural and man-made shapes!

KEEP READING: Download the Jingkids DIY Summer Camp Calendar!

Images: Cindy Marie Jenkins, QQ music

Listen, this timetable that schools sent us is fantastic and all, showing great strides from what everyone learned in a year. but some days the e-learning is just not going to work. The kids will be frustrated, upset at the situation, or sad when they see their friends but can’t play with them. Plus, many of us are now back to balancing our own work and household tasks, never mind showering, while facilitating e-learning for kids.

So what happens if the kids just won’t sit down for math class, or you know your preschooler wants to learn more addition but can’t wrap your head around a curriculum? You can pull up this handy list of fun math lessons rooted in real life.

Do you have suggestions? We want to hear all your math tricks in the comments!

Coin Stacks

Grab all those coins that rattle around in pockets or have piled up in a drawer, since who carries cash anymore? Have them stack each in a pile of just that same coin, then count each stack, line them up by height, and see whether the highest pile is the largest amount.

Toy Store

While you have the coins out, start playing toy store. If you don’t actually have coins then they can cut little circles and bills to use. Or, get out your Monopoly set and put those bills to use. Get your kid(s) to choose ten toys and line them up like they’re on display in the store. They can make signs and practice their writing, attaching price tags to each item. Then it’s dress-up time and kids can pretend to be customers and shopkeepers as they count out the play money and purchase their toys.

Make Your Own Math Game

Take the board from any board game, two dice, and play the game. Except, wait! If you roll a double of any number, then each player needs to subtract the amounts on the dice from each other, not add them together! And when you roll a double again, it returns to adding the numbers on the die.

Need to Cook? Teach Them Fractions!

Sometimes it’s hard to have your kids help you cook. It always takes longer than when you do it yourself and quite frankly, it’s messier. But I like to find recipes that require us to use fractions to make different sized helpings, and show them how to figure it out themselves. It’s also a great excuse to make cupcakes!

Have Montessori, Will Add Numbers

We got this simple Montessori-inspired math game, where you count up all the different colors for different parts of your math problem. Even if you don’t have the set, just cut index cards into smaller squares, write numbers, and the addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and equals symbols on them. Then take a few different colored pipe cleaners or crayons or anything you can use to count out each numeral. You’ve got yourself a math game!

Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your… Sum?

Take a die or two and roll the cube, then whoever correctly adds up the numbers first earns that same number of M&M’s, as long as they also count the accurate sum themselves. As long as you have enough M&M’s – and dental insurance – throw in a third die!

Clock Em!

Telling time can be a little abstract at different ages, and the best way we found to get it in their bodies – quite literally – is to make a huge clock on a wall out of construction paper. Give your kid big construction paper “hands” as gloves, call out different times, and see how quickly they can make it with their hands! It also works for a PE lesson if your kid gets really good at it.

Please Just Wait a Minute

Even asking them to wait ten minutes requires math. Pretty quickly we realized that our son mixed up minutes with seconds, and so we taught him that when we need five minutes to finish an email before we can play, that’s 5×60, which equals…….if you said 300, you get the point! Then they get to count down from 300 before holding you to your word!

Really, nearly everything can be a math lesson. But counting is really fun, and the more they learn, the more mysteries about the world they unlock!

KEEP READING: Stuck on Science? Online Camps Are Here to Help!

Photos: Pexels, Cindy Marie Jenkins

Two years ago, when I was preparing to make the transition to an English-language middle school, I faced a realization: up until that point in time, my entire primary education had been in Chinese. I had learned everything I knew about math in Chinese only, and I didn’t even know the English words “addition” and “subtraction”!

My parents and I realized that if I were to start middle school math in English, I’d have an uphill climb. So, the year before I transferred, I started using the online math courses at Khan Academy. Founded as a totally free, not-for-profit online learning resource back in 2008, it has exploded in popularity ever since, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The site now offers courses in a range of subjects including science, economics, reading, and history but is still best known for its world-class math courses. 

Studying math with Khan was hard at first, I knew how to do all the problems in Chinese, but I just couldn’t understand it in English. In order to build up my familiarity with the English terminology, I started with the lowest grades first.

I set a goal of doing a minimum of 20 minutes per day, at least five days a week when I found out I would be transferred to the Western Academy of Beijing (a school that follows the IB curriculum and is English based) for the start of middle school. As I practiced, I began to understand math in English more and more. Soon enough, I understood all the skills that I learned in elementary in English. When I entered sixth grade, I was no longer worried about my math. From then on, I’ve been able to keep my math grades up with the support of Khan Academy fairly consistently.

Here are some tips from one Khan academy learner to another:

1. Make sure you set a reasonable goal for yourself! Set a few skills that you’d like to practice within a reasonable amount of time. If you’re going to work on Khan Academy for a long period of time, make sure you remember to give yourself breaks. Also, make sure that you have a goal for the long term, so you won’t give up easily. For example, my goal is to keep my grades up in school and familiarize myself more with vocabulary in English.
2. Watch the instructional videos. I’ve made the mistake of skipping over these many times, but the videos are super important. In many cases, they show you how to master the skill in many different ways, and they are clear and easy to understand. Without them, I’ve gotten very frustrated over problems.
3. It’s a great review of tests and classwork. If you ever get stuck on a concept of skill in class, Khan Academy is a great resource. The videos explain themselves wonderfully, and if you get a problem wrong, you can see the step by step explanation for the question.
4. Make sure the skills that you’ve practiced are mastered before you move on to other skills. It might be difficult to remember a skill that you just learn without practicing it a lot. I tend to get distracted by other problems a lot but sticking to one skill will definitely help you master everything faster.

Overall, having Khan Academy to practice math with has been great. It’s motivated me because of its features that allow you to acquire achievements, to track your own progress, and to master different skills. I would recommend Khan to anyone interested in practicing math outside of school to strengthen their understanding of math.

KEEP READING: Free Printable Holiday Learning Resources for Beijing Families

Images: Khan Academy, Unsplash

One of the most striking architectural designs I’ve seen is the Alcazar of Seville in Spain. I learned of this magnificent palace as it was featured as one of the locations in the hit TV series, Game of Thrones.

The palace is one of the most renowned of the few surviving examples of Mudéjar-style buildings, inspired by Islamic architecture and designs of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Islamic decorations do not use figurative images, but instead intricate geometric patterns derived from the designs used in Greek, Roman, Persian, and other ancient cultures conquered by early Muslims.

The Alcazar of Seville has a majestic golden dome with complex symmetric ornamentations. Just recently, I’ve watched a TED-Ed video (requires a VPN to access) explaining the history of these captivating motifs, and I learned that it’s easy to do and a great way to use math in art as well as learn more about Islamic culture.

The Golden Dome of the Alcazar of Seville is a majestic centerpiece that shows the beauty of the geometric style of Mudejar architecture.

For this edition of Maker’s Corner, let’s celebrate Eid al-Fitr (the end of Ramadan) and create our kaleidoscopic patchwork of Islamic patterns that are sure to be not only fun but also amaze your friends and family.

For this project, we’ll make use of the basic instructions from Art Lessons for Kids website. The activity can last for at least 30 minutes and is good for kids ages 5 above.

What you will need
– Ruler
– Pencil
– Coloring materials (crayons, watercolor, or colored pens)
– Cardboard
– String
– Glue
– Compass (advanced)
– A clean sheet of paper

Step 1. This part is where math comes in. For younger kids, the teacher or parent can print out a ready-made polygon. The more sides the polygon has, the more complex and intricate the design will be. Older kids who have learned the basics of geometry can create their own circle with an inscribed polygon using a compass. Here’s a YouTube video that shows how to make inscribed polygons using a compass.

Step 2. So here’s the art part: Once the circle with an inscribed polygon is ready, draw straight lines linking different corner points of the polygon and the other resulting shapes. Just make sure they are symmetric.

Step 3. It’s coloring time! From the coloring materials you have, paint the shapes and patterns in your motif. It’ll be best to limit the colors to four, especially if you have an intricate pattern.

Step 4. Your motif is now ready. You can cut and paste it onto a cardboard and use a string to hang it, just like a dreamcatcher! You can also use the cutout to decorate items or make it a notebook cover.

Some ideas that make use of a geometric pattern, just like the project we did:
– You can redo our project, but this time you need to create two identical motifs with thicker lines (1/4 to 1/2 inch) and make the patterns less intricate. Cut out the inside shapes, and from the holes, you can paste colored paper or cellophane. Paste the other motif on the back side of the motif with colored paper. You’ll have a stained glass-type of the motif, which you can hang in your window!

– Instead of drawing the lines, you can use colored strings, like this project from Adventures of a Middle School Art Teacher. But you need to use corkboard pins or thick needles and stick them onto the corner points of the polygon in the circle. Then, you can attach strings and connect different points.

– Using the idea of radial symmetry, level up your motif and use paper folds and origami! Here’s a YouTube video by Art with Mrs. Nguyen showing that project.

The possibilities are endless, so enjoy making your Islamic-art-inspired geometric motif!

Photos: Mrs. Art Teacher (featured photo), Art Lessons for Kids, Adventures of a Middle School Art Teacher, Art with Mrs. Nguyen, Andy Penafuerte, stockunlimited.com

The young boy looks up at the market vendor, and quickly hands over the exact amount of cash. That seller smiles back at the clever little international, who’d just finished bartering with him in fluent Mandarin. After negotiating with the Chinese vendors and making his purchases, the boy and his classmates (and the teachers supervising them) will return to their math class at House of Knowledge’s (HOK’s) Shunyi campus, to discuss, in English, what happened.

Such are the practical, multifaceted and fun assignments given to students at the school, which prides itself on helping students become multilingual and multicultural. This particular market assignment is one of the excursions that HOK’s math students make to give the skills they learned in the classroom real life heft.

Wei Laoshi of HOK

Venturing out on such field trips to use their math skills is a breeze for the HOK students because they are already deeply immersed in HOK’s bi-numeracy program, following the Chinese curriculum and its repetition heavy style of multiplication tables and equation drilling, while also being taught more abstract approaches by their western teachers.

“Our students are from different countries— China, Europe, America— so they will get two ways to learn math. And they will get an opportunity to choose the way that suits them,” Wei Laoshi, who heads up HOK’s math department, says of the school’s bi-numeracy approach. Below she tells us more about the benefits of the unique math methods.

HOK’s students not only use conventional textbooks but also thread beads onto pipe cleaners and others use handheld materials to help them better visualize the concepts

The added benefit of the bi-numeracy program is teachers’ collaboration effort, they use the best of both worlds to give the students an enriched approach.

“Our Chinese and English math teachers are co-teaching, but we follow the Chinese national standard. So the Chinese and English math teachers are always on the same page, and follow the same content.”

“For example, right now our Grade 2 class is learning multiplication tables. The Chinese teacher gives them tables and teaches them through repetition first, then they do more visual and abstract practice with beads, pieces of dry pasta, or other materials with their Western teachers.”

“My daughter is in a Chinese public school, she doesn’t like doing math in the traditional way on paper all the time. She’ll complain ‘Oh it’s too much for me,’ and sometimes it even makes her cry. But here the students have a choice, and are able to learn more than one way and then find which method is most comfortable for them.”

The students use China’s standardized math curriculum, and its repetitive nature gives the children a very solid foundation

“They benefit so much from learning both the Chinese and Western styles. The Chinese style gives them the repetition they need to become very familiar with it, but the Western style helps them to engage with it in a different way, which is especially good for students who struggle with math.”

This different approach to learning focuses on the student taking ownership of their own learning based on their personal strengths and preferences.

“This way, our students have more chances to understand the concepts, by learning the same thing in different ways. That way, the students can think “I have that choice of how to do it or approach it, and I’ll be more comfortable.”

“As a teacher, I can see that our students are so interested in math. They can all choose a method that suits them, and realize: “Hey, this is easy and I like it!”

It’s an approach that benefits the students well beyond math class.

“The students also develop their language skills, go back and forth between Chinese and English to understand and explain the concepts.”

“We also give the students context and history and explain how sundials were used to measure time in both ancient China and in Europe, for example. That way they are not only learning about math but also about both cultures.”

This blog is sponsored by HoK

Photos: Uni You 

Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Turks are better at math because the language makes it easier to understand and comprehend. A recent Wall Street Journal article highlight how English’s complex numbering words makes it difficult to understand the place value of the numbers.

The trouble starts at "11." English has a unique word for the number, while Chinese (as well as Japanese and Korean, among other languages) have words that can be translated as "ten-one"—spoken with the "ten" first. That makes it easier to understand the place value—the value of the position of each digit in a number—as well as making it clear that the number system is based on units of 10.

English number names over 10 don’t as clearly label place value, and number words for the teens, such as 17, reverse the order of the ones and "teens," making it easy for children to confuse, say, 17 with 71, the research shows. When doing multi-digit addition and subtraction, children working with English number names have a harder time understanding that two-digit numbers are made up of tens and ones, making it more difficult to avoid errors.

Read more about this here.

Photo: mathematicssas.files.wordpress.com

This app was bought by the Pearson Education Incorporated in mid 2013. This app has math based tutorials to help confused math students in both middle and high school and is free. 

Features
This app is a very useful tool for students who are having a difficult time remembering how to do specific types of math problems. The videos offer clear step by step with a teacher demonstrating the idea on a whiteboard. The app is not for students only but comes in handy for parents and non-math teachers.

The app has a short description for the less than 5 minutes videos for the various sections making sure that the selection of the videos is made easily. Virtual need Mobile Math is divided into three sections, Pearson Mathematics Program, Common Core and Virtual Nerd. The Pearson Mathematics Program features Grade 6-8 digits, integrated high school, Algebra 1and 2, and geometry to pick from. In the Common Core section users can get Grade 1-8 basic maths (number and operation in Base Ten, measurement and data, and more) and high school topics such as number and quantity, algebra, geometry, and more. In the Virtual Nerd section this is divided into two categories – by grade (6-8, high school) and assessments (SAT and ACT). 

The videos are short and pretty straight forward and of outstanding value since its free. The lack of access to videos site such as YouTube and Vimeo, this app has a video library that is easy to access and searchable. Also, the instructions are accurate and clear.

The app has no distractions in that, there are no links to social media, outside ads or in-app purchases.

Ages: 10+
Category: Education
Content: videos
Platform: iPad only
Language: English, German, Northern Sami, Spanish
Price: Free

Photos: appannie.com

• Make a short shopping list and get your children to cross them off as you put them in the trolley.
• Keep the recipe book open so you can look at it together and emphasise how you are following instructions.
• See if you can find words on packets eg sugar, flour eggs."Can you find the same word as this one in the recipe book."
• Ask how many foods can you think of that begin with, for example "s".

• Let children hold a full bag of sugar so they begin to get a concept of 1kg.
• Pick up different packages, "feel" how heavy they are and try ordering them by weight to develop estimation skills.
• Get your children to help with weighing out ingredients.
• When decorating cakes try and put on a specific number of chocolate buttons (or whatever decoration you’re using).
• Use different shaped cutters for biscuits and help them learn 2D shape names… "Let’s make these biscuits into triangles. How many sides will they have and how many corners?"
• Don’t forget to weigh in grams. Schools are completely metric even if some of our old cookbooks still show imperial measures.

• Look on labels to talk about the country of origin.
• Talk about which foods need a hot climate to grow.

• When making biscuits or gingerbread, let the children rub the fat into the flour to develop strength and co-ordination.
• Rolling pastry mixtures into round balls using the palms of hands will develop these skills too.
• Play "guess the smell" when you bring out new ingredients.

• Introduce the idea of melting by asking what happens to chocolate when it gets hot? This introduces the important science concept of change.
• Talk about the ingredients you use and where they grow. Try sorting the ingredients for a fruit salad into 2 groups – eg which ones grow on trees and which ones don’t.
• Make sure your children understand why they need to wash hands before working with food.

• Listen to children’s ideas and let them make suggestions.
• Talk about the different flavours and colours you could use.
• Selecting their own toppings for a pizza and arranging it all themselves.

• Make something for a friend and invite them over for a tea party to eat the goodies.
• Make something with a friend or siblings and take turns and share the jobs.

Photo courtesy of rolling cookies (Flickr)