Roman Arithmetic

...basic Roman arithmetic is largely rather simple, even for those of us spoiled by Arabic notation. Addition is no sweat, because complex Roman numbers already use what math pros call additive notation, with numerals set beside one another to create a larger number. VI is just V plus I, after all. To add large numbers, simply pile all the letters together, arrange them in descending order, and there’s your sum. CLXVI plus CLXVI? CCLLXXVVII, or CCCXXXII. And one of the advantages of the Roman...

 Use a Big Opening for Class

In your planning, consider what you most want students to know and then work backward to develop an opening that promotes sustained interest toward that goal. If possible, represent the unit in several different ways that appeal to different learning strengths and levels of achievable challenge so you can continually engage all students. Here are some fascinating facts you can use as “big openings” with your students to help them with number sense, specifi cally with understanding large numb...

 Core Elements of Reading Skills

In 2008, the National Institute of Literacy issued its report, Developing Early Literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel, and, among its many findings, stated that the foundational reading and writing skills that develop from birth to age five have a clear and consistently strong relationship with later conventional literacy skills. “These six variables not only correlated with later literacy as shown by data drawn from multiple studies with large numbers of children, but also ma...

 Know Your Players

ACTING Players who enjoy acting like getting into character and speaking in their characters' voices. Roleplayers at heart, they enjoy social interactions with NPCs, monsters, and their fellow party members. Engage players who like acting by ... giving them opportunities to develop their characters' personalities and backgrounds. allowing them to interact regularly with NPCs. adding roleplaying elements to combat encounters. incorporating elements from their characters' backgrounds into yo...

 The Law of Large Numbers

The game is called who’s the best at flipping coins. It’s pretty simple. You flip a bunch of coins and whoever gets the most heads wins. To make this a little more interesting, though, not everybody has the same number of coins. Some people—Team Small—have only ten coins, while the members of Team Big have a hundred each. If we score by absolute number of heads, one thing’s for almost sure—the winner of this game is going to come from Team Big. The typical Big player is going to get around 5...

 We Must Become Comfortable with Large Numbers

Borel makes the amusing supposition of a million monkeys allowed to play upon the keys of a million typewriters. What is the chance that this wanton activity should reproduce exactly all of the volumes which are contained in the library of the British Museum? It certainly is not a large chance, but it may be roughly calculated, and proves in fact to be considerably larger than the chance that a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen will separate into the two pure constituents. After we have learned ...