Describes the children's museum movement, exhibits common to children's museums, and the role of children's museums in providing interactive environments for young children to complement the learning that goes on in classrooms and at home. Provides contact information for five children's museums. (DR)

A hands-on simulation on spider web construction is described. Students recreate the mysteries of web construction by creating a yarn web with a pentagonal frame, 12 spokes, and 12 spiral loops. Contains instructions to the teacher for constructing the web board. Provides a procedure for the students to follow. (PR)

The author of EC 606 784 describes the background of her research, noting her experience with the "TOUCH MATH" manipulative materials to help students with mild disabilities acquire math facts and computational skills. (DB)

Uses match sticks to construct various polyhedra in the Euclidian space R3. Formalizes the idea of a match-stick construction and characterizes all obtainable points with such constructions algebraically. Specifies all the constructible ones among the uniform polyhedra. (Author/ASK)

Presents an activity involving balloons to help students understand characteristics of polymers. (MKR)

Presents five worksheets that contain hands-on geometry activities dealing with the ideas of quadrilateral, trapezoid, parallelogram, isosceles, kite, axis of symmetry, and rhombus. (MKR)

Tests the hypothesis that maturing prefrontal lobes play a role in the development of proportional reasoning skill because the prefrontal lobes are involved in the inhibition of task-irrelevant information and the representation of task-irrelevant information. Assigns students randomly to manipulative or verbal tutoring groups and tests both…

Reports on a study of 10 middle grades teachers' uses of manipulatives for teaching mathematics using interviews and observations to explore how and why the teachers used the manipulatives as they did. Concludes that using manipulatives was little more than a diversion in classrooms where teachers were not able to represent mathematics concepts…

Two mathematics activities introduce elementary students to geometry, using depth, width, and height. A primary level activity involves students with sorting and classifying geometric solids and with comparing numerical quantities. The activity requires building blocks or geometric solids. An intermediate level activity teaches students about…

Assesses the use of manipulative aids and how they are used in primary mathematics classrooms. (Author/CCM)

Considers the use of playdough as a manipulative to help children learn mathematics. Provides snapshots of various lessons using playdough. (Author/CCM)

Two ideas of mathematics that the students discuss here, demonstrate how sometimes a teacher can learn something new from the students. The examples given use geoboard and show relationships of the two ideas with the Pick's theorem.

Methods to automatically convert graphics into tactile representations have been recently investigated, creating either raised-line or relief images. In particular, we briefly review one raised-line method where important features are emphasized. This paper focuses primarily on the effects of such emphasis and on comparing both raised-line and…

In this article, the author discusses the Soroban (Japanese abacus) in the age of computers and its structure. Since the advent of computers, the Soroban has started to shift from being used purely as a calculating device to being a useful tool in general mathematics education. The beauty of the Soroban is that it represents numbers exactly as you…

We investigated the effects of transparent fraction names on children's reasoning about fractions. U.S. and Korean first and second graders were tested using verbal and nonverbal measures. On a verbal task, Korean students were worse at interpreting their own conventional fraction names than interpreting modified terms with a more familiar word…