If you’ve divided a rectangle more than 11 times (and kept the fraction clear) please let us know about it!

Sheppard Software seems to be no stranger to differentiated instruction. You’ll find many topics with levels of difficulty starting with easy, for primary students, through to levels that will challenge adults (Think you really know where the states are? Try this game ).

The quick links give you a glimpse of what is available. And the list of popular games hints at what people are finding particularly valuable right now. But don’t take our word for it. Go and explore. You’ll be amazed at what you find. It is good that you have the summer to explore the free learning games on this site because it will take all summer to peruse. View one of my daughter’s favorite activities:

Math teachers have long enjoyed using food in their lessons.  Whether we use M&M’s to discuss fractions, or pizza to learn about circles,  food can be a fun part of the lesson.  Subway’s recent decision to arrange their isosceles cheese slices in a more “geometrically satisfying pattern,” is the latest opportunity for teachers to integrate food into math lessons.  With the websites below, your SMART Board can be the perfect conduit to make the final connection to the curriculum.

Four Friends Need to Cross a Bridge – One Lamp, 17 Minutes.

The Water Jug Puzzle from “Die Hard with a Vengeance.”

SMART Boards have changed the way teachers and students interact with their computers.  Sketch Recognition has the potential to do the same.  Leaders in the area include A&M’s Tracy Hammond, and MIT’s Randall Davis.  Below is a video of Davis demonstrating an early version of a software called Assist.

For more information, visit http://rationale.csail.mit.edu/project_software.shtml

• Regular Polygons, Not Regular Polygons/Quadrilaterals, Not Quadrilaterals
• Various Topics; Multiples, properties of numbers
• Rectangles, Not Rectangles/Red, Not Red
• Classifying Polygons
• Can Fly, Can’t Fly/Bird, Not a Bird
• Number Properties

It is in our best interest to use multiple activities in order to involve our students’ most developed intelligence in active learning. By getting students to come to the board and manipulate “information,” we access their “spatial” intelligence as well as “bodily-kinesthetic” intelligence.

But let’s take it up a notch with the kinesthetic movement.

We don’t just want some movement here, we really want to get our students dancing while they are up at the board. So we have to create “buttons” for them to touch that are far apart from each other. For those shorter students, we can get them jumping to reach the “buttons.”

An example that comes to mind is a flash card activity with mathematics. But this could be applied to any question and answer game in any content area. For my activity, I have created a Notebook 10 file. Each page in the file has a math question and two answer buttons that are links to other pages in the file (see images). I would instruct students that they have to start with their feet touching a strip of tape which is about three feet from the wall. The instructions include having to return your feet to the tape after every touch on the board. Making them return serves two purposes. First, it gets them moving, a lot. Second it moves them back from the SMART Board so they can more easily read the question and view the possible answers.

This type of activity can be applied to any subject and Q&A scheme. One thing to keep in mind; make sure you check all the links before having students use the file. Remember, you need to  create a “try again” page for each question. It is all easy enough to do, but a little time consuming.

If you are pressed for that ever-precious resource we call “time” and you teach multiplication, I have found some online math activities that would require some movement and could meet the same purpose as the activity that I have described above. The great part is that they are already created for you. The following site contains some great activities http://www.multiplication.com/interactive_games.htm. My very favorite is “Disco Dino”. The music is funky and smooth! See Disco Dino at http://www.multiplication.com/flashgames/DiscoDino.htm.

How are you going to build the link between your students’ bodily-kinesthetic intelligence and their other developed intelligences? What other intelligences can we activate with the SMART Board? Get Moving!

The video below shows how to create an activity where students can “tear” the corners off a triangle and rearrange them along a protractor to demonstrate the Triangle Sum Theorem.