How Can I Include Math In My Child's Summer?
Use the activites below to maintain and enhance your child's math skills. Sign your initials by each activity your child finishes or
tries for at least 10 minutes. At the end of the summer send this form to your child's teacher to show your child's work.
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Suggested summer math activities for students entering 6th grade
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Have your child estimate how long it would take to count to a million.
Cook or bake with your child, asking them to double or triple the recipe, especially with mixed numbers (Example: Triple a batch of cookies
where the original calls for 1 1/2 cups of chocolate chips. 1 1/2 times 3 is 4 1/2 cups).
Have your child look in the newspaper for as many numbers with at least three digits as they can find. Round each one so that all the digits
except two are zeroes.
Challenge your child to estimate the number of leaves on a tree.
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Look at a map of your neighborhood. Play a game with your child where one player names the intersection of two streets and challenges the
other to find that location.
Challenge your child to estimate how many words are in a particular book.
Play Battleship with your child. Each player makes two 10x10 grids (one for ships and one for tracking the opponents' ships), labeling the
rows 1-10 and the columns A-J. Players secretly place ships that have the following lengths in their own grid: Aircraft carrier-5, Battleship-4,
Submarine-3, Destroyer-3, Patrol boat-2. Players alternate calling out shots (such as "B3"). The fired shot is recorded in the tracking grid.
The first player to sink all the other players' ships wins.
Have your child make a list showing their age each year their life next to their sibling's age that same year. Have them make a graph showing
the results. How do the ages compare? What will the ages compare in the future?
Ask your child to find out: how long is their hair? Have them measure it in millimeters, and round their answer to the nearest 10.
Go on a 2-D shape identification scavenger hunt with your child. For each shape you find, identify all the categories it falls into (Example: a
square pillow is a quadrilateral, parallelogram, rectangle, kite, rhombus, and square; a yield sign is a triangle, an acute triangle, an equilateral
triangle (sides the same), and an equiangular triangle (angles the same)).
Challenge your child to figure out how many years old they are as a decimal (Example: 10 years, 4 months, 17 days = 10 years + 120 days +
17 days = 10 years + 137 days (1 year/365 days) = 10.375).
Have your child write down instructions for doing a common task (taking a bath, making a sandwich, tying their shoes) in the form of a list or
flowchart.
Have your child compare gas prices at two or more stations.
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Have your child read a thermometer or the thermostat and round the temperature to the nearest ten degrees.
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Have your child find out: What is the average number of days in a month?
Have your child find out: How many electoral votes are needed to be elected president? (You need a majority (over half) of the 538 electoral
votes.)
Play 50-50 with your child. Roll one red die/dice and two white dice. Each player makes a fraction with the red die/dice divided by the sum of
the two white dice. The player then writes their fraction followed by either "> 1/2", "= 1/2", or "< 1/2". Check with a calculator or another
person to see if the statement is true. If so, gain two points. If not, lose half a point. First to 20 wins.
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Have your child measure the lengths of stems of leaves from a nearby tree to the nearest 1/8th of an inch. Show the results in a dot plot.
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Have your child estimate the weight of garbage thrown away by your family every year.
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Have your child measure how much liquid each cup in your cabinet holds to the nearest 1/8th of cup. Put the results in a dot plot.
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Challenge your child to explore what happens when they multiply or divide a number by 10, 100, 1000, 10000, etc. (they may want to use a
four-function calculator).
Have your child create a family tree diagram.
While at the store, find an item that is stacked high, deep, and side to side. Have your child figure out how many of the item there are total by
multiplying the height, width, and depth of the stack.
Have your child estimate the number of grains of salt in a salt shaker or grains of sugar in a bag of sugar.
Play 20 Questions with your child (one player thinks of an object and other players ask up to 20 "Yes" or "No" questions in an attempt to
guess what it is).
While at the gas station or going near one, have your child estimate the price of filling up a tank.
Find something in a catalog or at the store that all the children in the family are interested in. Have your child divide the price by the number of
people to find a fair way of distributing the cost.
Have your child estimate the number of hairs on their head.
Play Hula-Hoop Groups with your child. Have them stand inside of three hoops (or use belts, jump ropes, ribbon, etc.) and let them drop to the
ground. Without moving their feet, push one hoop backwards, one up and to the right, and one up and to the left. Let each hoop represent a
different category (red, rectangular, starts with 's', edible, plastic, etc.). Find things around your home to put in each of the 7 sections formed
by the rings, as well as things to go outside the rings.
While traveling in a vehicle, ask your child to find out: How far (to the nearest mile) has the vehicle traveled since it was made? Rounded to
the nearest 100 miles? The nearest 10,000?
Throughout the day have your child, find the percent of calories from fat in foods by dividing calories from fat per serving by calories per
serving.
How Can I Include Math In My Child's Summer?
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Suggested summer math activities for students entering 6th grade
Teach your child to play the one-player game Multiply Mania . Use a standard deck of cards with face cards removed and treating 10s as 0.
The goal is to arrange as many of the cards as possible in multiplication problems. Arrange a problem like 321 x 3 = 963 using one 1, one 2,
three 3s, one 6, and one 9. They should arrange as many problems as they can without running out of cards.
Have your child go on a scavenger hunt for objects that are scaled versions of one another. Say how many times bigger the larger one is than
the smaller one (Example: A serving spoon is twice as large as a regular spoon, a dictionary is twice as big as a kids book, a yard stick is three
times as large as a ruler, a regular car is ten times larger than a toy car, a shoe is four times larger than a baby shoe, a big paper clip is twice
the size of a small one, etc.).
Have your child estimate how many breaths you've taken or how many heartbeats you've had.
Have your child ask someone their favorite digit 1-9. Tell them to multiply this by 9, then multiply that by 12,345,679.
Have your child draw a map of a yard or sandbox on graph paper. Number the rows and the columns. Hide or bury a treasure somewhere in
the space. Give clues to the treasure based on the numbers on the map.
Have your child draw a large tic-tac-toe board on a blank sheet of paper. Write the numbers 1-8 small on another sheet of paper and cut them
out. Arrange them randomly on the board leaving a blank spot. Try to put the numbers 1-8 in order using the following rule: you may move
the number directly above, below, or beside the current blank spot into the blank spot.
Challenge your child to figure out how many tokens they can put on a 3x3 grid such that there are never three in a row horizontally, vertically,
or diagonally. How about 4x4?
Have your child estimate how many books are in the library.
Ask your child to find out: how many times can they clap in one hour? Measure them for one minute, then ask them to multiply. They should
round their answer to the nearest 100.
Have your child estimate the number of sheets of paper used by your school throughout a full school year.
Play What's My Date? with your child. Using a calendar, one player gives clues to describe a particular day of the month by describing the
month of the year, week of the month and day of the week (Example: I'm thinking of a day in the first week of June. It's a Saturday. What's
my date?).
Have your child draw a map of a room in your home on graph paper. Number the rows and the columns. Hide a treasure in the room and
use clues based on the row and column numbers on the map to find the treasure.
Have your child estimate the number of strands of carpet in a room in your home or the number of blades of grass in a lawn.
Arrange objects or draw shapes to form a pattern. Have your child guess what pattern you were thinking of.
Play The Red Plastic Window with your child. One player lists a few pairs of items where one can be seen through the Red Plastic Window
and the other cannot, using a secret rule. Other players try to learn the rule that determines what things can be seen there by guessing items.
The rule is that things with double letters are not allowed (Example: Through the Red Plastic Window you can find lifeguards but not
swimmers, quarters but no pennies, cows but no sheep, etc.).
Have your child find out how much the tax on one item at the store will be before purchase.
Play Towers of Hanoi with your child. Lay three pieces of paper side by side labeled 1, 2, and 3. Get five books of different sizes and stack
them largest to smallest on pile 1. Move all the books to pile three following these rules: only move one book at a time, only put smaller books
on bigger ones.
Look in the newspaper or a magazine with your child for the largest numbers you can find (written with digits such as $ 91,321,144.00 or with
words such as two trillion, etc.). Round them to the nearest power of ten (a '1' followed by '0's) and represent this with scientific notation
(Example: $ 100,000,000 = 108 or 1,000,000,000,000 = 1012, etc. (the small, raised number, or exponent, tells you how many 0s the number
has)).
Challenge your child to find out: Could they fit a stack of 500 plates on the floor in the kitchen? ( measure the kitchen's height in feet, a plate's
height in inches, multiply, convert, and compare).
Ask your child to estimate how many minutes they spend using media (phone, TV, computer, books, etc.) in one year.
Cook or bake with your child, having them halve the recipe (Example: Halve a batch of cookies where the original calls for 1/2 tablespoon of
baking powder. 1/2 divided by 2 is 1/4 tablespoon).
Have your child write the number googol in the normal way (1 followed by 100 "0"s) and in scientific notation (10^100 where the small 100 to
the upper right represents the 100 "0"s).
At a restaurant or while looking at a take-out menu, challenge your child to find groups of items that will add or subtract to an exact dollar
amount (Example: fries ($ .75) + side salad ($ 1.25) = $2.00 or combo ($ 3.99) - chicken nuggets ($ .99) = $ 3.00).
Have your child make an animal hybrid: Draw two animals, then draw an animal with a mix of the attributes of both animals.
Have your child find out: How much does a resealable plastic bag hold? Fill a quart-sized bag with rice or water and then measure the
amount. Was it more or less than a quart? By how much? How about a gallon-sized bag?
Have your child find the thickness of a page in a book. Measure the thickness of the book, count the pages, and divide.
Ask your child how many seconds old they are?
On a blank sheet of paper draw circles of different sizes, some overlapping, some inside one another. Have your child label each circle with an
adjective. Have them write the names of objects inside the circles so that each word is inside all of the circles that describe it and none of
the ones that don't.
In the store or looking through grocery ads have your child round prices to the nearest ten cents, dollar, ten dollars, or hundred dollars.
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