Three Outdoor Maths Ideas

Taking maths outside helps break up the monotony of everyday pen and paper exercises. It’s always appreciated when you lead children into the school playground and turning maths skills into something necessary for a competition, an interesting way to observe the world, or just something a little more fun than usual. Enclosed here are three ideas for inventive outdoor maths activities, and what they teach.

The Maths Map challenge – Depending upon how much play equipment you have in your school’s playground, the amount of imagination needed for this task will vary greatly.

Arrange your children into teams of three or four. Each team will need a metre rule and a large protractor. Give them each a set of mathematical clues to determine how far in a certain direction they will need to walk to reach the next step of the puzzle. Once there, they can find another clue, which will give them another maths puzzle to give another step. Clues might include things like “You need to walk the same number of metres towards the lunch hall as half all the chairs in classroom B12” or “Walk forward 5×3 steps at an angle three times the number of swings to your left”.

Integrating climbing frames, monkey bars, and other such items into the network of clues can be great further immersion builders. Maybe the children are a team of survivors in an escape pod, looking for the main body of the wreckage of their crashed spaceship. Maybe they are on a quest through a jungle, searching for a hidden temple. Maybe they are pirates who have to decipher the treasure map. The possibilities are endless!

Car Counting 2.0 – This is a classic of so many school days, but as children get older and more sophisticated in their understanding of maths in general, and statistics in particular, perhaps it is time to introduce more complex angles.

Most of the time car counting involves just one metric. Colour, make, model, first letter of the number plate etc. How about instead we up the game, and introduce a wider field of variables. Break your class into teams of four to five, and have them try and spot different crossover trends. See if there is a confluence of red cars with number-plates starting with R at particular times. Are there more Fords around after lunch or before?

This has a number of valuable lessons. Not only does it teach children to think laterally about connections, it also shows them how patterns can emerge in the mind, even when none are truly present. Even more skills and challenges can be presented once you get children back into class and have them represent the data they gather in new and exciting ways.

Dara A lateral thinking and strategy game that can be played outside, but works well indoors too. Children can either play against each other as individuals or in teams.

• Have the children draw a grid on the ground in check of 5 squares by 6 squares
• For each board have the opposing players/teams each find 12 objects of a specific kind. Pebbles, pine cones, bark fragments. Something distinctive and unlikely to blow away.
• The children then take turns to place one piece on the board. They cannot put them so any three of their own pieces are in either a vertical or horizontal row
• Once all the pieces are placed, the players then take turns moving their own pieces. They may move any one piece to a square either vertically or horizontally adjacent (NOT DIAGONAL!). The goal is to move three or more of their own pieces into a line. When they do, they may remove one of the opponent’s pieces.
• The game ends when one team can no longer move any of their pieces into a row of three. When this happens, the other team wins.

A classic game from Africa, which encourages strategic thinking, forcing children to view a puzzle from every possible angle. While this may not immediately seem maths related, the kind of thinking needed to win a game of Dara is exactly the processes you need to develop skills in algebra, calculus, and other more complex forms of maths later in the curriculum.

Why Relationships Require Learning

In order to make something work out well, you need to do some learning first. The same goes for relationships. Most people don’t even consider putting any effort into mastering the skill of family life. Some were lucky to inherit a couple of useful behaviour habits from their parents, but the rest have to figure everything out on their own. Fortunately, habits can always be changed.

The most dangerous misconception about love

There’s one false assumption that keeps spoiling relationships: if both of you love each other, then your couple is happy and flawless by default. You already have nothing more to improve; everything just happens by itself! And if something goes wrong, then there’s no love, and it’s time to part ways and start looking for someone better. But in fact, nothing happens by itself. Typically, “ideal relationships” last no more than 1-2 years, and then the harmony abruptly disappears.

A new approach to relationships

Time flies forward, and the 21st century dictates its own rules. Obviously, the old approach to relationships no longer works. You can throw everything old and useless out of your head and replace it with something new. Let’s do it right now:
– Take a simple life fact – nothing happens by itself! You need to learn to build a relationship step by step.
– Stop treating love with reverent fanaticism and look at it realistically.
– Treat your relationship like a business project.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these points.

Why is it impossible to let everything go by itself?

Relationships need to be built, just like houses. Try to put a pile of bricks in front of you and time how long it will take for a house to build itself. You’ll hardly see that happen.

About 50 years ago, everything was a bit different. Divorce was considered a shame. People had to learn to interact with each other in order not to break up. It wasn’t always successful, but nobody cared if someone was happy or not. Pretty lousy way to hold the family together, but now, couples don’t have anything like it or better because relationships are no longer valued.

Why do you need to take a sober look at love?

Infatuation is similar to magic. And love is the fruit of the joint work of two people on the path to common goals. Everything else – passion, feelings, desire, butterflies in the stomach – is cool and fun, but this is nothing compared to the emotions you can get from a competently built relationship. This doesn’t mean that you need to completely turn off your feelings and choose your one and only from those who meet your demands and expectations and nothing more. With the same success, you can just hook up with the first person you meet on some Ukrainian dating website.

Why is it important to treat your family as a business project?

This is not only about the financial component. It’s rather about recognizing the simple fact that your family is your private business. But for some reason, people approach business seriously, spending a lot of money on education. But creating families, they don’t even try to learn something new. The “family” project requires at least two people, and everyone wants to get benefits for themselves, such as affection, love, understanding, care, and support. This is all mutual benefit, just like in business.

Some couples even frown upon those who want to explore the issue of building relationships. They say that people willing to study their union in more detail don’t have their own opinion, so they listen to YouTubers and coaches who brainwash them. But if a person wants to learn to drive a car, they go to a driving school to a person with experience in driving. Why is it sometimes so difficult for people to ask advice from someone who has built a happy and harmonious family? A coach has already gone through all the ups and downs, and they’re ready to share the best of their experience with you.

Best tips for helping your child with math

Doing math homework is sometimes challenging not only for children but for their parents as well. However, if a child asks us for help, we must respond. How can you help if you finished school twenty years ago and remember nothing from the math course? Here
we offer several tips for making it easier for you.

Tip 1: Make a Schedule

Setting specific timing when doing homework with elementary students is crucially important. They must be aware of this time and be prepared. One should comply with this rule not only when doing math homework, but homework on other disciplines as well. Its duration should not exceed half-time spent in class – around 20-25 minutes. A child will be more alert and concentrated if he/she had enough rest after school lessons and ate well.

Tip 2: Avoid Doing Homework Instead of Your Child

Some parents are tempted to complete math homework instead of their children for saving time. However, this will do more harm than good. It would be better to ask your child whether he/she understands what the initial problem is. Experiences have shown that in 90% of all cases children merely don’t understand the problem. If the problem is clarified, but your child can’t extract the meaning from your explanations, write a note to your child’s teacher asking him/her to provide an explanation in class.

Tip 3: Respect Math Program and Demonstrate It

The majority of parents are not professors. Only a few of them are doing great in this discipline. However, showing that you value the program will help to develop respect for math in your children. As a rule, children copy the actions of their parents. By showing respect you can encourage them to learn this discipline in-depth. You can also show your interest and practice math when you both have some free time: on your way to school or
coming back after classes. It’s also important to create a positive atmosphere around math at home and school. Maybe you will need to talk about it with your child’s teacher. Math homework help must not be only homework help, it should rather be an object of interest.

Tip 4: Talk to Your Child’s Teacher Regularly

By building relationships with your child’s teacher you will be able to control your child’s knowledge and directly ask for help if needed. It would be great if you meet with the math teacher at least three times per semester to ensure better classroom connection.

Tip 5: Find Math Homework Help Online

You can find math homework online if you failed to solve the problem independently. Parents who solved the same math tasks before often place their solutions online. So, you can browse the internet and find a solution for your task if you tried to solve the problem for five hours without success. However, don’t overuse this tip as it can become a bad habit with time. We hope you find our tips useful and now you can help your child to get better grades in math.

5 Reasons to Learn Java and Why It Rocks

Are you dreaming to have a successful career in IT and wondering which programming language is the best to start with? Learning to program opens up endless opportunities, and there are lots of programming languages to choose from. A good idea is to learn Java which has proved that it’s one of the best programming languages around over the course of more than 20 years. Read on to learn about the most important reasons why you should learn Java programming.

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Java Is Easy to Learn

Actually, it’s one of the top reasons to learn Java. The language has an easy syntax with not many magic characters so you if you become familiar with the key concepts and procedures, you will be able to write a program in Java. There are tons of online resources that can help you in the learning process but be ready to work hard and focus on coding if you want to become a Java expert.

It’s common knowledge that students who study computer sciences usually don’t like writing essays which they have to complete to graduate with a degree. Learning to code requires much time and effort, and numerous essays and term papers make students feel overwhelmed and lead to a stressful college experience. Luckily, there are online writing agencies and ordering sample papers on a reliable website can be a good solution to relieve stress and have more time to focus on the subjects that really matter.

Lots of Jobs Opportunities

Java is widely used in the real world. According to the TIOBE index for July 2018, Java is the most popular programming language so it continues to create jobs in the tech industry. Java programming skills are in great demand almost everywhere. Java is platform independent and can work on anything from smartphones to Kindle e-readers, cars, medical devices and much more. It enables cloud development within the IoT and for enterprising in different industries. This feature attracts lots of new development. Java programmers outnumber any other programming language professionals, and they are among the highest paid programmers with an average salary of $69,722 in a year’s time.

It Is Open Source

We all like free things. Java is free so developers don’t have to pay anything to create Java applications. Costs are very important if an organization wants to use a technology or when you want to learn a programming language. Anyone can build and execute applications absolutely free with Java. This feature helped Java become popular among large organizations and individual programmers.

Java has a great collection of open source libraries contributed by Google, Apache, and other organizations. These libraries make Java development fast, cost-effective, and easy. There are also frameworks like Maven, Struts, and Spring.

Java Community

There are more than 10 million Java developers in the world, and this strong and thriving community continues to grow. There are a lot of active forums, Stack Overflow, different Java users groups, where beginners and advanced programmers can get free help from community experts. As a newcomer, you can always get free advice from experienced programmers.

Rich API

It’s the crucial factor behind Java’s success. Java is highly flexible and provides API for almost everything – utilities, networking, database connection, I/O, XML parsing. Java has a powerful IDE that makes development fluent, easier, and faster. NetBeans and Eclipse make coding in Java a pleasant experience. You can get everything you need if you couple Java with a wide variety of tools supported by the open source ecosystem – JconSole, decompilers, ANT, and Maven for creating Java applications, Visual VM for checking Heap usage, and more.

How you can find a cheap online content writer

In this modern age, it is very essential to find a qualified and knowledgeful online cheap article writers that make an excellent quality article by using proper grammar rules and following all given instructions by the client. There are many online cheap writers that create an article and of these writers, you will find varying levels of writing skills, vocabulary, punctuations and grammar usage. Before entering into a contract with any writer you should ensure that they have the proper skills you are looking for and produce the type of quality work that your company requires.

In 2108 if you are looking for a specific type of writer then you need to be as specific as you can in your advertisement. Sometimes many clients want articles in other languages. A linguistic has a firm grip on different languages at the same time. If your articles are written in English then you should state that you are looking for native English speakers. Usually, customers required articles in English, without any permission you can visit writer cheap online for quality English writers to enhance the level of your content.

There are few suggestions for cheap article writers:

Quality articles will always be worth the price whereas substandard work will use additional time and money, more than originally anticipated. Price and quality are not mutually exclusive but it is possible to get desired work in your desired price range.

Most of the self-employed writers take pride in their work and want to produce articles that are of good quality so that you will want to continue using their services. There are some writers that do not take as much pride in their work and those are the ones to be on the watch for. Quoting a cheap price does not mean you will get good work at a low price, it may mean that you are just getting a low rate. If you have to deal with a writer that has writing problems then you or your customers may spend additional time fixing mistakes and checking work.

Time frame is one the alarming problem for online writers and their customers. It is mandatory to give a proper timeline to writers to accomplish their tasks for writing the content. Most companies require writers to submit some kind of writing sample. They may request the writer to write them a test article or to rewrite a short article following specific instructions. They usually include a deadline, as many companies do need a quick turn over, within 24 hours. Companies will usually select a few individuals to send in writing examples and then chose the one that best fits their needs.

Your substance essayist ought to likewise make sure to embed interfaces on your substance pieces. This ought to be done to encourage web-based promoting, as in any guest that odds upon your site by means of the articles beaten by your substance essayist could very well turn out to be keen on your specific line of business. A proficient substance author would know how to do this with the assistance of substance administration framework devices. Being Internet-sharp is without a doubt amazingly, one more quality you should search for in your substance author. With these characteristics joined, your independent substance essayist will have what it takes to make your site the most read in your specific speciality.

Differentiated Instruction in the Math Classroom

Differentiating in the math classroom is a must for teachers who want to engage their students and shift math learning from passive to active.  Gone are the days where the math teacher worked problems on a chalkboard in front of a class and the students watched from their rows of desks and then silently practised sample problems.  The age-old I-do, we-do, you-do is not enough to reach today’s learners.  Direct instruction leaves minimal room for differentiation, so in order to meet the needs of all learners consider constructing lessons that incorporate the following types of learning – and check out Study.com’s new differentiated instruction hub for a host of practical and useful resources for differentiating in schools.  Your students will thank you!

Authentic

The long-standing question in the math classroom is: “When am I ever going to use this?”  And students are right to ask this question.  As teachers, if we’re not connecting the learning to practical applications, we’re only teaching part of math. Understanding math is more than crunching numbers to arrive at an answer.  It is crucial to engagement and comprehension that students understand the function, use, and purpose of math in order to attain success at higher levels of math.  Make math authentic by including real-world connections in your instruction.  For example, what careers are your students interested in pursuing?  Making math relevant to those careers is particularly authentic. Also, make learning meaningful to students by connecting to their interests outside of school.  Baseball stats or money are motivating and differentiating for some students.  Use this to your advantage.  Much of math is abstract; make it concrete for students by teaching the connections between math and our world.

Active

Math isn’t seen as fun for many students because it’s not taught in a way that’s active.  Teacher instructs, models, and then students practice.  A more effective way to meet student needs is to have them collaborate and problem solve.  When introducing a new topic, put students into groups and encourage them to use what skills they already know to solve the problem.  When a group comes up with the answer, they can show their classmates the steps they took.  If no one is able to come up with the correct answer, use their methods to lead a class discussion about why none of the ideas worked.  Brainstorm what the next steps could be to solve.  When necessary, direct instruction can act as the key to unlock impediments to problem-solving.

Hands On

Math is all about numbers.  Getting students’ hands-on items that represent numbers is a great way to engage and differentiate for learners.  Physically manipulating items or arranging laminated numbers for a problem is a great way to help students think about math differently.  For some students, the concreteness of realia is what’s needed to make learning stick.  Seeing, holding, and manipulating numbers takes them off the page and engages a different type of learner.  Even foldables are effective for approaching math content in a more hands-on way.

Make your math instruction accessible and effective for all learners by differentiating.  Include authentic, active, and hands-on learning in your lessons to meet the needs of learners with different abilities, learning preferences, and backgrounds.

Check out the new differentiated instruction hub at Study.com for practical, useful ideas and resources. And as a little giveaway to our readers, if you like their stuff you can use the promo code StudyComTeacherDiffPromo to get 20% off the first three months of their teacher plan!

Financial aid shouldn’t be based on income

Many schoolchildren heard from their peers or teachers that it is possible to study free of charge at a prestigious university and, at the same time, to receive money. But for the most people, it remains a mystery how to get a scholarship or a grant for education. Mainly, there are two types of financial aids: for children from low-income families and for students with high academic achievement. Prevailing part of experts consider the second type to
be fairer because it provides for a direct relationship between the work of the student and the reward. Such a natural selection allows bringing to the forefront the most capable, talented guys and girls, to motivate them for further work.
It’s no secret that teenagers with excellent marks feel very depressed when educational institutions and authorities do not pay attention to them and direct all finances to orphans and kids whose parents earn little. Luckily, today, universities provide enough rewards based on talent and purposefulness. Let’s talk about what to do to get such financial aid.

Who conducts scholarship and grant programs?

In most cases, financial aid for students is provided by:

• universities that initiate research in a particular industry;
• the country’s governing bodies or regional representations;
• Department of Education;
• private firms that are interested in finding specialists;
• charitable funds, which cover their educational activities.

Who can pretend to a scholarship or a grant?

First of all, a student needs to understand that the times when only people of brilliant knowledge or children from rich families could study at prestigious universities have already passed. It is necessary to learn that personal abilities in combination with desire and motivation give an opportunity to absolutely all students to take part in beneficial educational programs. As practice shows, committees choose those participants who are among 10% of the best students of a university, take an active part in the conferences and forums, have experience in their speciality, write scientific articles and publish them.

Universal requirements for a candidate for a financial aid
It is difficult but quite real to get a scholarship or a grant that would cover 100% of the cost of education. This requires serious preparation of a student for participation in the program, as well as high academic indicators and active out-of-university development. It's easier to get a
scholarship that covers half of the cost of education. In this case, the requirements are lower, but the costs for housing and food are not included in the amount of financial aid. In general, a candidate can expect to receive a scholarship or a grant if he meets the following
basic criteria:

• high marks achieved at school and university;
• participation in competitions and contests;
• the average score of the certificate not below the level "good" – the mark itself depends on the educational institution and the speciality;
• high achievements in sports, volunteering, scientific research, creativity, etc.;
  possession of several languages;
• availability of good characteristics from teachers.

Relying on these requirements, a candidate can assess his chances to receive a scholarship or a grant. As a rule, the list of mandatory criteria is set by the initiator of the funding.

How to get a scholarship: the necessary documents

The collection of documents is a very important stage in the process of applying for a scholarship program. It is worth preparing for it in advance and carefully check all the information. It depends on the correctness of the submitted data, whether the members of the committee will take your candidature for consideration.

So, an approximate list of the necessary documents is as follows:
1. Written application for participation in the program.
2. Autobiography and CV with a full description of the candidate’s achievements.
3. A motivation letter which answers the question: “Why should you become the owner of a scholarship or a grant?”
4. 2 or more letters of recommendation from your mentors with their contact data(teachers/employers).
5. Copies of educational documents (certificates).
6. Other documents that are specified in the program description.

How long does a scholarship or a grant program last?

Scholarship programs for students can be designed for different periods: the shortest – 2 weeks of stay abroad, the longest – 3 years in a foreign or native university. It should be understood that a grant or a scholarship cannot be postponed. Financial aids are issued for a certain period of time.
Also, remember that it is not enough just to become a participant in the scholarship program. You will not receive regular payments if your academic performance will deteriorate. Marks should always be perfect. This is a rather difficult task, especially for young people who plan to
combine education with work.

Sometimes, it’s better to contact the specialists of the reliable essay writing service with a request “Do my homework” than to lose control over a situation and to be deprived of payments for the next semester because of the one paper submitted to a teacher with a delay.

Resources for the search for scholarship programs

How to get a scholarship and where to find information about it? These are the most popular questions from students. If you are looking for such offers on your own, look through the official websites of the universities where you would like to study. If you did not find the necessary information about scholarships and grants there, contact the department of financial support of the educational institution. When searching for worthy offers abroad, visit the websites of the government authorities of the country where you want to travel for study. For example, proposals on scholarships or grants for foreign students can be placed on official pages of the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.