Resources for mathematics enrichment

I’m currently putting together a list of resources for our elementary school teachers to use to enrich their mathematics classrooms. Our basic philosophy is to provide opportunities for all students to engage in rich mathematical tasks, and to add breadth & depth to their program of mathematical study, rather than accelerating through the British Columbia curriculum.

I’m looking for more resources for each of the areas below, but I don’t want to over-whelm my colleagues with options. Any suggestions? Ideally I’d like resources which are straight-forward to use, and which promote the philosophy described above.

Resources for enrichment

Problems with open-ended solutions.

• Marion Small’s Good Questions
• Adapt current questions. See Louise Hodgon’s presentation for examples of how to do this.
• Create problems where students have to do more of the problem solving process. Useful resource: 101qs.com
• Open-ended investigations: MathThinking.org
• Convert typical textbook problems into open-ended problems. See this paper for some examples of how to do this.
• Learn how to ask better questions.
• Useful description of low threshold, high ceiling problems here (thanks Paul)
• The mathematics assessment project.
• Dan Meyer’s Three Acts and 101qs.com sites.

Puzzles

• A great selection of problems to challenge a wide variety of skill levels. http://www.mathpickle.com

Math contests

• CEMC past math contests
• Many other contests are online, which you can potentially sample questions from.

Games

• Choose games which have some basis in logic & reasoning to solve, or which require students to use mathematical skills in context. Eg. Monopoly is a terrible game for logic & reasoning, but a good game to practice addition & counting in a financial context.

Programming

• See this article of mine for some examples of useful programming environments
• See CodeAcademy.com or Hackety-Hack for some intro to programming sites.

Real life contexts

• Find ways the mathematics students are learning is present in their current life
• Provide opportunities for students to learn interesting mathematics (perhaps even outside ‘the curriculum’!) that occurs in nature
• Sample activity: Have students take photos of things which appear to be mathematical to them