K12

K-12 resources

These are activities I’ve made for my elementary-school aged kids, and I’m releasing them here in case others find them useful.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Basically, you’re free to use these at home and in school as you see fit; you can also modify them.

Sight words “Spot-it” game

For young kids (pre-k to 1st grade, particularly kindergarten) who are learning to read. This is a version of Spot It! (aka Dobble) that uses common sight words.

Setup: print out all the file double-sided, so you have 2 double-sided sheets. Cut out the sheets so you have little slips of paper with 6 words on each paper. Each slip should have the same words on the front and the back, so you don’t have to worry about flipping them over.

Game play: the basic play is that two cards are displayed, and all players (1, 2 or more) try to find what word is in common between the two cards. There is always exactly one word in common.

You can make variants of this game play, and make it either a solitary game, cooperative game, or competetive game, depending on the nature of the kids.

Click the image below to dowload the full resolution PDF

Slide rule activity

This consists of two parts:

First, you can print and then cut out the two rulers, and use these to multiply numbers by just adding the values. This is the most basic use of a slide rule. This is suitable for most elementary school aged kids.

Secondly, the back side of the sheet explains how it works. This may be suitable for older and advanced elementary school kids, but is quite tricky, and may challenge middle-schoolers, high-schoolers and even adults without a math background.

Click the image below to dowload the full resolution PDF

Outreach talks

• “Research in Applied Math at CU”, Math Circles talk (K-12), Sept 15 2024. Slides.