Circle Geometry Puzzle

Just a little bit of extra fun in Circle Geometry for my Extension 1 students.




I'd like to try more of this sort of thing, but it was hard work! Maybe the students should make their own as a homework assignment.

Day 16: Christmas Mazes

A quick search will find you a LOT of Christmas Mazes and similar puzzles. Here are some highlights.

• The ones at Classroom Jr are straightforward and cute. These are the ones in my patented Mathsmas folder.

• Activity Village have a few, but this Christmas Tree one is just beautiful. Forget the maze, I just want to colour this in.

• In amongst a huge list of printable Christmas activities at Print Activities are some "Count by..." mazes, such as this count by twos maze. They also have some Christmas Cryptograms that are fun too.

Day 10: Christmas Sudoku

Sudoku with Christmas symbols instead of numbers. Some kids ones here and here. Not a bad intro to sudoku for kids who aren't already familiar with it, but way too easy for those who are.

This one's a bit bigger and uses the words from "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" and "Seasons Greetings". Your handwriting sure deteriorates writing whole words. But it's very achievable for a learner too.

To teach kids the ideas of Sudoku, I also found this Christmas Sudoku to play online that takes you through filling in the gaps with increasing difficulty. It's a very short run through, but you could discuss it as a class as a starting point.

Day 9: Christmas Codes

Another one of Michael's recent teaching activities. Rather than just giving out notes or reminders, he's been encoding them using dingbat fonts and getting the students to work them out.

The first time you do this with a class, it's good to give them the first line or at least a word or two to get them started. After that, talk about the common letters and words that are most likely to appear, or look at double letters, so they can start working them out for themselves. The more you do this activity, the better at it they will get.




There's lots of great free fonts out there for this, although some cool ones don't have the whole alphabet, or don't include numbers. I tend to look at dafont and I used Xmas Dings for this one.

Use it to encode wordy definitions at the start of a topic, or a summary at the end (this is a good one because they should have some idea of what words will appear). Or for reminders about what to bring to class, what topics will be studied this term, or class rules.

Get students to write their own summary of a topic and encode it and swap with another student to crack the code. Or give pairs of students a topic each from the whole year to summarise, encode, then give out a copy of each to the whole class.

Since it's Mathsmas, make a series of encoded clues to solve a greater puzzle and give a prize for the first to piece all the clues together.

Need a clue? The title is Triangles.