Swag for Mathletes?
November 4, 2014 8:47 AM Subscribe
I'm coaching a team of 3rd graders for the Math Olympiad. They're a bit young to compete, so it's all about fun this year. Every week they get a packet that is, essentially, extra homework. I want to find some small rewards to give them for finishing the packet.
So far I've picked up some small novelty erasers. Any other suggestions? Math-themed loot would be especially good.
The dollar bins at Target are kinda boring and also kinda expensive. Archie McPhee is cool but not much of it is appropriate for eight-year-olds of a variety of backgrounds, and it also gets expensive fast. I didn't find anything on Think Geek that would work. The toys in dollar stores tend to be so poorly made they're just depressing. I don't want to give them candy.
There are six kids and I'm paying for the swag and their snacks myself every week until the spring, so I'd like to keep costs as low as possible.
So far I've picked up some small novelty erasers. Any other suggestions? Math-themed loot would be especially good.
The dollar bins at Target are kinda boring and also kinda expensive. Archie McPhee is cool but not much of it is appropriate for eight-year-olds of a variety of backgrounds, and it also gets expensive fast. I didn't find anything on Think Geek that would work. The toys in dollar stores tend to be so poorly made they're just depressing. I don't want to give them candy.
There are six kids and I'm paying for the swag and their snacks myself every week until the spring, so I'd like to keep costs as low as possible.
Maybe you could set up a point system so they get some kind of ticket or sticker for each week that they complete the packet, and then you could have a variety of prizes that they could get once they reach a certain number of points/tickets/whatever. You could have different levels of prizes for different ticket values.
This way you wouldn't have to purchase things for every week, and I think it might actually make it more exciting if they have to save up for a prize that they really want. The prizes still could just be something like stickers or pens or whatever, but it would keep them from accumulating a lot of junk and keep costs lower for you.
posted by litera scripta manet at 9:24 AM on November 4, 2014 [4 favorites]
This way you wouldn't have to purchase things for every week, and I think it might actually make it more exciting if they have to save up for a prize that they really want. The prizes still could just be something like stickers or pens or whatever, but it would keep them from accumulating a lot of junk and keep costs lower for you.
posted by litera scripta manet at 9:24 AM on November 4, 2014 [4 favorites]
Poke around the Math Circles website, find a hands-on activity, and pick up supplies for that activity. The Museum of Math activities page might be fun, too.
Polyhedral dice, origami paper, and string for tying knots are all basic math toys. (You can buy bulk dice or big soft dice aimed at teachers, or pretty dice aimed at gamers.) Anything shaped like a doughnut could work, if you try out Jeff Weeks' Torus Games at the link above. You could get coloring stuff and talk about the Four-Color Theorem.
If your budget stretches to $2-$5 per student plus shipping, I recommend trying a few searches on Shapeways. That's a 3D printing site with a ton of mathematical art. Some search terms to try are fractal, hypercube, icosahedron, dodecahedron, and Möbius, as well as plain old math or mathematical.
Finally, if you've got local university contacts, you could inquire whether someone is willing to collect swag for you at the Joint Math Meetings (January) or MathFest (summer). The big math conferences are typically good for free pens and stickers, as well as the occasional branded toy (I've got an AMS yo-yo and NSA juggling balls on my desk).
posted by yarntheory at 9:26 AM on November 4, 2014 [4 favorites]
Polyhedral dice, origami paper, and string for tying knots are all basic math toys. (You can buy bulk dice or big soft dice aimed at teachers, or pretty dice aimed at gamers.) Anything shaped like a doughnut could work, if you try out Jeff Weeks' Torus Games at the link above. You could get coloring stuff and talk about the Four-Color Theorem.
If your budget stretches to $2-$5 per student plus shipping, I recommend trying a few searches on Shapeways. That's a 3D printing site with a ton of mathematical art. Some search terms to try are fractal, hypercube, icosahedron, dodecahedron, and Möbius, as well as plain old math or mathematical.
Finally, if you've got local university contacts, you could inquire whether someone is willing to collect swag for you at the Joint Math Meetings (January) or MathFest (summer). The big math conferences are typically good for free pens and stickers, as well as the occasional branded toy (I've got an AMS yo-yo and NSA juggling balls on my desk).
posted by yarntheory at 9:26 AM on November 4, 2014 [4 favorites]
I agree if you have friends who go to conferences hitting them up to get extra schwag is a great idea. And all of the printables and origami suggestions are great. I get bulk origami paper on amazon for my students. I am a school librarian, and I always take stickers and bookmarks when I see them for free. Lego has a free magazine that you can sign up for. It's a great big advertisement, but kids love it- you might want to sign up for 6 subscriptions and that could be a monthly "prize". I also think that kids love pictures of themselves (they don't get many now that we have moved to smart phones as cameras) and I would say group pictures to build team pride.
posted by momochan at 10:18 AM on November 4, 2014
posted by momochan at 10:18 AM on November 4, 2014
My kids are about this age, and they are motivated to earn points/achievements as suggested up thread. How about a star sticker system for completing the packets, and a promise to have a math team pizza party with a video if N packets are completed by spring? My fourth-grade stepdaughter just got to attend a special "kids' day in" where all fourth graders were allowed to wear pajamas to school and have a pizza party for reaching a set of academic goals. Might be more economical to make the reward a bigger thing later rather than a lot of smaller things along the way, you know?
posted by little mouth at 12:05 PM on November 4, 2014
posted by little mouth at 12:05 PM on November 4, 2014
Response by poster: For various reasons that are too boring to list I don't want to set up a token economy; I want stuff I can fling at the kids each week.
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:17 PM on November 4, 2014
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:17 PM on November 4, 2014
If you get temporary tattoo paper, you can print your own designs each week. (And rather than cheap individual items, see if you can get sets of things so that they're cheaper in all. "Party favors" is a good search term too.)
posted by Margalo Epps at 3:06 PM on November 4, 2014
posted by Margalo Epps at 3:06 PM on November 4, 2014
In my experience, any little pieces of junk work: rubber balls, pencils, stickers. Even though the kids often forget about them shortly, they enjoy receiving them. They do like to select their items from a junk, I mean treasure, box. Recycled items are great. I have a piles in every drawer and closet in the house that I would love to give you.
Our orchestra teacher gives the kids yarn pom poms that they tie on their instruments whenever they finish a practice card so by the end of the year they have a handful of colorful pom poms hanging from their instrument. I just saw a really cute way to make mini pom poms with a fork if you (or young relatives) feel crafty. Then for each finished packet, the kids could pick a pom pom of their choice and tie it on their notebook or binder creating a record of their work. (I know! This sounds crazy but the orchestra teacher is genius and the kids love the pom poms.)
posted by RoadScholar at 3:36 PM on November 4, 2014
Our orchestra teacher gives the kids yarn pom poms that they tie on their instruments whenever they finish a practice card so by the end of the year they have a handful of colorful pom poms hanging from their instrument. I just saw a really cute way to make mini pom poms with a fork if you (or young relatives) feel crafty. Then for each finished packet, the kids could pick a pom pom of their choice and tie it on their notebook or binder creating a record of their work. (I know! This sounds crazy but the orchestra teacher is genius and the kids love the pom poms.)
posted by RoadScholar at 3:36 PM on November 4, 2014
(1) Purchasable toy ideas
Not sure these will be within your budget, but just a few ideas:
-metal wire puzzles
-wooden peg brainteaser games
-flat marble mazes,
-cube marble mazes,
-other spatial brain-teasers
-spinning top (the larger flat optical illusion ones esp good, but might be too expensive)
-mini slinky
-magnets
("party favor" seems to be the magic search phrase for getting the 12-for-$8 packs of these; for some reason Amazon has many of them under 'health and personal care' rather than 'toys and games')
-Dover dot-to-dot, spot-the-difference, or maze mini-books (not sure if these would be too young?)
These seem to be more expensive, but maybe searching could yield cheap ones:
-Tangrams sets
-Sliding block puzzles, often called 15 puzzles (that one is expensive, but maybe you can find them for cheaper)
-snake fidget toys, or rubik's cube,
-fiddly polyhedra like magic loops wire figure; polygonzo;
- mathy/logicky games - Mastermind, Cribbage, Mancala, Uno - might be able to find classroom packs of these somewhere?
(2) Fun photo-
Suggested above, a picture of themselves - could have a different mathy/sciencey theme each week, like Space Exploration, and photoshop the kid's face into a set background, so if they finish the packet on Astronaut week, they get a printed little card of themselves as an Astronaut the following week? And they'll collect a different one each week? I bet there's a straightforward way to get "frames" online to put around the kid's face in photoshop... Maybe you could get a badge-holder on a lanyard, like they have for conferences, and the weekly thing could be in the form of an ID badge (Astronaut License etc) and the kids could pick which one they want to put in their badge-holder that week. Everyone would start with an Official Mathlete one, so they all have something to put.
(3)Stickers or markers that add up each week in one place -
Give them each an Official Mathlete Membership Card that has spots for weekly stickers, and each week they finish the packet they get a sticker for that week on their card. Or could make it in the form of a figure that makes it fun to put the stickers on, like, what creatures will live in your Math Zoo or whatever. (Or even do a similar thing with something that hangs on their backpack zipper, and lets them add little "charms"? This is kind of the pom-pom idea above.)
(4) Each week, you could pose a larger team logic puzzle/mystery, and for each person who finishes the packet, you can unlock an additional clue to help the team solve it.
Also, I went a little nuts thinking about activities you could do with them during your club time, so here's a big braindump of ideas:
- Idea books - Searching for "math fun kids" yields some good -looking activity books and brainteaster/puzzle/math mystery books, that might give you good ideas for club activities. One that looks good is a series of these cool math art for kids books (with paper and string-based math objects to build). Other sourcebooks: Magic squares (there are a ton of books on these) or anything in the Dover Recreational Math series (that search is limited to the ones tagged for children).
-Games -- Logic games! - There are a ton. Mastermind and Clue are the old classics here, but animal mastermind, dot arranging, AnimalLogic, Zoologic, many more....... Visual puzzles! - Set; Ricochet Robots (sort of like Set, in that it's kind of a spatial/visual puzzle that everyone can play silently at once, or you could have everyone talk about it and figure out solutions together)....... Programming! - Robot Turtles (I haven't played this but it's supposedly Logo programming as a board game); Roborally is probably too time-consuming?..... Geometric! - Tangrams (there are many sets on Amazon, or you could get a classroom pack and a Dover book to xerox patterns out of), tetris tangams kits (there are many of these, LonPos is another brand); Architecto (sort of 3-D tangrams), Blokus, Blokus Trigon; Rumis (Blokus 3-d). Rush Hour and related multi-puzzle kits by the same maker. .... Arithmetic! There are many, Cribbage of course, Twenty-Four, Sequence Numbers, Sumoku, math dice, etc, tho these are not as novel for the kids IMO - or maybe I just dislike arithmetic ..... Coloring! Have them color pages from a tesselation coloring book, showing that you can make very different designs depending which segments you color, like old Altair Designs books.
posted by LobsterMitten at 5:40 PM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
Not sure these will be within your budget, but just a few ideas:
-metal wire puzzles
-wooden peg brainteaser games
-flat marble mazes,
-cube marble mazes,
-other spatial brain-teasers
-spinning top (the larger flat optical illusion ones esp good, but might be too expensive)
-mini slinky
-magnets
("party favor" seems to be the magic search phrase for getting the 12-for-$8 packs of these; for some reason Amazon has many of them under 'health and personal care' rather than 'toys and games')
-Dover dot-to-dot, spot-the-difference, or maze mini-books (not sure if these would be too young?)
These seem to be more expensive, but maybe searching could yield cheap ones:
-Tangrams sets
-Sliding block puzzles, often called 15 puzzles (that one is expensive, but maybe you can find them for cheaper)
-snake fidget toys, or rubik's cube,
-fiddly polyhedra like magic loops wire figure; polygonzo;
- mathy/logicky games - Mastermind, Cribbage, Mancala, Uno - might be able to find classroom packs of these somewhere?
(2) Fun photo-
Suggested above, a picture of themselves - could have a different mathy/sciencey theme each week, like Space Exploration, and photoshop the kid's face into a set background, so if they finish the packet on Astronaut week, they get a printed little card of themselves as an Astronaut the following week? And they'll collect a different one each week? I bet there's a straightforward way to get "frames" online to put around the kid's face in photoshop... Maybe you could get a badge-holder on a lanyard, like they have for conferences, and the weekly thing could be in the form of an ID badge (Astronaut License etc) and the kids could pick which one they want to put in their badge-holder that week. Everyone would start with an Official Mathlete one, so they all have something to put.
(3)Stickers or markers that add up each week in one place -
Give them each an Official Mathlete Membership Card that has spots for weekly stickers, and each week they finish the packet they get a sticker for that week on their card. Or could make it in the form of a figure that makes it fun to put the stickers on, like, what creatures will live in your Math Zoo or whatever. (Or even do a similar thing with something that hangs on their backpack zipper, and lets them add little "charms"? This is kind of the pom-pom idea above.)
(4) Each week, you could pose a larger team logic puzzle/mystery, and for each person who finishes the packet, you can unlock an additional clue to help the team solve it.
Also, I went a little nuts thinking about activities you could do with them during your club time, so here's a big braindump of ideas:
- Idea books - Searching for "math fun kids" yields some good -looking activity books and brainteaster/puzzle/math mystery books, that might give you good ideas for club activities. One that looks good is a series of these cool math art for kids books (with paper and string-based math objects to build). Other sourcebooks: Magic squares (there are a ton of books on these) or anything in the Dover Recreational Math series (that search is limited to the ones tagged for children).
-Games -- Logic games! - There are a ton. Mastermind and Clue are the old classics here, but animal mastermind, dot arranging, AnimalLogic, Zoologic, many more....... Visual puzzles! - Set; Ricochet Robots (sort of like Set, in that it's kind of a spatial/visual puzzle that everyone can play silently at once, or you could have everyone talk about it and figure out solutions together)....... Programming! - Robot Turtles (I haven't played this but it's supposedly Logo programming as a board game); Roborally is probably too time-consuming?..... Geometric! - Tangrams (there are many sets on Amazon, or you could get a classroom pack and a Dover book to xerox patterns out of), tetris tangams kits (there are many of these, LonPos is another brand); Architecto (sort of 3-D tangrams), Blokus, Blokus Trigon; Rumis (Blokus 3-d). Rush Hour and related multi-puzzle kits by the same maker. .... Arithmetic! There are many, Cribbage of course, Twenty-Four, Sequence Numbers, Sumoku, math dice, etc, tho these are not as novel for the kids IMO - or maybe I just dislike arithmetic ..... Coloring! Have them color pages from a tesselation coloring book, showing that you can make very different designs depending which segments you color, like old Altair Designs books.
posted by LobsterMitten at 5:40 PM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
Mini Rubik's cube (magic cube) key chains.
Actually anything on a key chain... marble mazes, those little rubber "coin purse" things...
Are you planning on doing this again in the future? If you're willing to stock up on 2-3 years worth of these things you can spend less per piece, for example this random online wholesaler (disclaimer, I haven't ordered from them) is pretty cheap for magic cube key chains, as long as you're buying at least 24.
posted by anaelith at 6:37 PM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
Actually anything on a key chain... marble mazes, those little rubber "coin purse" things...
Are you planning on doing this again in the future? If you're willing to stock up on 2-3 years worth of these things you can spend less per piece, for example this random online wholesaler (disclaimer, I haven't ordered from them) is pretty cheap for magic cube key chains, as long as you're buying at least 24.
posted by anaelith at 6:37 PM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
Also Halloween stuff is on sale right now...
Costumed duckies... also in glow-in-the-dark. Rubber stampers. Bouncy balls. Plush monster heads.
posted by anaelith at 6:48 PM on November 4, 2014
Costumed duckies... also in glow-in-the-dark. Rubber stampers. Bouncy balls. Plush monster heads.
posted by anaelith at 6:48 PM on November 4, 2014
When I was on the math team we all got into Rubik's cubes pretty hard. You can get nice ones on Amazon for pretty cheap, or you could go with a 2x2x2 cube for even a bit less.
posted by soonertbone at 10:12 AM on November 5, 2014
posted by soonertbone at 10:12 AM on November 5, 2014
Response by poster: Thanks for all the suggestions, which I'll dip into as the year goes on. I hadn't thought to ask people for swag; doing so already scored me six cool little notebooks.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:48 AM on November 7, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:48 AM on November 7, 2014 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:51 AM on November 4, 2014