Family Math night for grades 2 and 3

Last night I wrote about my plans for Family Math night for grades K – 1 – that post is here:

K-1 Family Math night

Tonight I’m thinking about what to do for grades 2 and 3. One thing on my mind is the Collatz conjecture, but I’m worried that will not be as interesting for the 2nd graders who may not have seen much multiplication. Have to save that one for grades 4 – 5, I guess.

As with the k-1 night, I’ve got about an hour to do 3 activities. My plan is to have 2 topics as the main source of fun for the night and keep the third in my back pocket if we have enough time.

Topic 1 will be Anna Weltman’s Loop-de-Loops.

  

We did two projects with Anna’s idea and the kids had a blast:

Anna Weltman’s loop-de-loops

Anna Weltman’s loop-de-loops part 2

Topic 2 will be the Fold and Cut theorem. Hopefully we’ll be able to introduce the topic with Katie Steckles’ awesome video:

Here are some of the projects we did after seeing this video:

Our Fold and Cut project

Fold and Cut part 2

Fold and Cut part 3

Finally, the topic I’ll keep in my back pocket is Pascal’s triangle. There are enough patterns and fun things to talk about with Pascal’s triangle that it is sort of perfect for a project with an unknown amount of time. Getting to something like this would be great:

Talking through Dan Anderson’s mod 2 Pascal’s Triangle