Five Sources of Summer Math Activities for Elementary School Students

If you're like me and you still have another week or two until summer break, you might be looking for some resources to share with students and their parents to help prevent summer slide. In fact, a few readers emailed me this week looking for suggestions for math activities to share with parents of elementary school students. Here are five good places to find summer math activities for elementary school students.

MathGames.com
Don't let the name fool you, MathGames.com offers more than just a series of math practice games. You can find hundreds of worksheets to print for free on MathGames.com. Those are organized according to grade level.

There are plenty of games for students to play on the site too. You can find those by clicking on the "games" header in the site. If you do that, scroll down the page a few times to find the MathGames.com digital textbook which organizes the games according to topic.

CK-12 Elementary Math Resources
CK-12 offers a good collection of resources for elementary school math practice. The collection is organized by grade level (grades 1 through 5) and skill set. The resources include a mix of videos and online practice exercises. Students can review a video and then attempt the practice activities.

MathQuiz.io
MathQuiz.io is a math game developed by a student. It's a relatively simple site that presents you with a series of math problems to solve in your head then enter an answer. The problems are presented in sets of ten consecutive questions. You can play in an "easy" mode which is mostly simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication or you can plan in the "medium" mode which incorporates problems with fractions, division, and negative numbers. 

A Maths Dictionary for Kids
Jenny Eather's A Maths Dictionary for Kids has been one of my go-to math resources for many years. It students provides simple and clear definitions of math terms. Each definition includes a small diagram or simple activity to illustrate the term's definition.

A Maths Dictionary for Kids has more than 270 free worksheets arranged according to topic. All of the worksheets can be found here.

ABCya
ABCya offers hundreds of educational games for K-8 students. The site is arranged according to grade level and Common Core standard. The trouble with that arrangement is that you can't search for a skill without knowing the corresponding Common Core standard. If you use keyword search on the site, it will yield results to everything on the site, not just the games.

Math Games and Resources

There are so many fun and exciting resources available to help you engage students in your math classroom. These are some of the most popular math resource posts from Free Technology for Teachers from the last couple of years.

• Math Playground and Hundreds of Math Games and Videos- Games and videos for students in grades 1-8. This site has been around since 2002!
• More Than 100 Math Games for Elementary and Middle School Students- Find online math games that allow students to practice basic arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and probability. Keep track of your students' scores.
• 5 Free Resources for Math Teachers Using Chromebooks- Check out Desmos , Graph.tk, Geogebra, Math Vocab Cards, and Geoboard.
• 10 YouTube Channels for Math Lessons- Ten channels that will help your students learn about anything from basic mathematics to calculus.
• 21 Real World Math Lessons for High School- This collection of math lessons helps students learn how to apply concepts to real life situations.
• Great Ideas for Using Scratch in Elementary Math- Learn about a binary calculator and ScratchMath.
• Fraction Mash- iPad app for elementary school math lessons
• Using Google Apps in a Math Classroom- Tips, ideas, and best practices for using Google Apps
• Five Good Math Sites and Apps for Elementary School- List of five different apps that can be used with elementary students. 

Find Fun K-8 Math Activities on Math Chimp

Math Chimp is a catalog of more than one hundred online mathematics games for elementary school and middle school students. Teachers can find games on Math Chimp by selecting the grade that they teach then selecting a standard or objective. After you make those selections Math Chimp will direct you to an appropriate mathematics game for your students.

Math Chimp offers a small library of instructional videos for each grade level. The videos are matched to the skills students practice in games for the same grade level. To find an appropriate video just select a grade and a skill.

Freddy's Fractions is an iPad and Android app from Math Chimp. In Freddy's Fractions students help a sea turtle named Freddy find fractions that are larger or smaller than the one that is presented at the beginning of each level. If you don't have access to an iPad or Android tablet, Freddy's Fractions is also available to play as a browser-based game.