Philip Pirrip on Organization

Today’s commonplace quote is from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens:

One of my goals in recent years has been to follow C.S. Lewis’s advice, “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”

I started at one-for-three and find myself moving ever closer to the one-for-one ideal. The more I read old novels, the less satisfying many of the new ones are.

Currently, I’m re-reading Great Expectations and discovering how much I’d forgotten over the years. Only a few key scenes are familiar, but everything else is new again.

Including the delightfully funny scene where Pip and Herbert try to deal with their ever-accumulating debt by copying out each amount neatly on a fresh sheet of paper.

Apparently, my way of handling to-do lists follows an old, well-established tradition.

And is probably just as effective.

• Math Game Monday: Walter Joris’s Sequencium

• The Mathematical Adventures of Alexandria Jones

• Thinking Thursday: John von Neumann

[If you’re reading this late, the “Math Game Monday” and “Thinking Thursday” posts have a time limit. Each one stays on my blog for about a month, and then falls away, replaced by new games and journaling prompts. You can always find the newest posts at DeniseGaskins.com/blog.]

I’m making progress on the next pair of Math Journaling Adventures logbooks. There’s not a lot to say about the writing stage: review current prompts, collect new prompts, reject one of my prompt ideas and try something else, rinse, repeat.

A reader asked whether there’s overlap between the logbooks, so I did a quick count. Every Math Journaling Adventures logbook contains more than 100 prompts, each with a 2-page spread that offers plenty of room for writing and doodling.

Just over a third of the prompts either repeat from the other books or echo them with slight variations. These are the sort of evergreen activities your students can do every year (or even multiple times in the same year) and learn something new each time. They grow with your child.

That means nearly 70 prompts in each book are unique to that book. These may be specific problems to solve, number relationships to investigate, strategy games to analyze, freewriting topics, geometric designs to explore, and so on.

In all, the books are a useful open-and-go resource for math enrichment that will last a semester or a whole year—or even longer, depending on how you use them.

You can find the first two Math Journaling Adventures logbooks (plus related goodies) in my Playful Math Store now. These new ones will probably be coming to Kickstarter next spring.

Reminder: Digital ebook and printable activity guide prices are going up in September. Shop now!