If you missed the first part of this post, you can find it here. Sometimes, you have this tremendously awesome lesson planned to take your students outside educaching and you've prepared several hours, when all of a sudden, the storm clouds roll in. You need to have a backup activity in mind. If you are a math teacher of 5th grade or higher, I recommend Mathcaching! The folks at www.mathbits.com have put together some excellent resources here.
The way mathcaching works is, you visit a web page called Box 1. There are 3 math problems to solve here. You then use the correct answers to help navigate to a web page called Box 2. The correct answers to this next set of problems will lead you to the next cache page and so on. This is just like finding virtual caches online. It works similar to a puzzle cache on geocaching.com. This activity is a lot of fun. The problems are challenging, and your students will work hard to find the correct answers and will check their work if they get a bum link.
If you have laptops, ipads, ipods or school desktop computers to use with students, you might want to pair them up for this hour (+) activity. It can be split over several class periods or when you have a spare 10 or 15 minutes. If you have a teacher computer and are able to project the website to your classroom, then this also makes a great whole class activity. I highly recommend visiting here to try out the basic mathcaching hunt on your own first before using it with students. I think you'll be impressed and you may have one more great tool in your arsenal of inclement weather activities!
Happy Hunting!
