Number Sense and Nonsense: Building Math Creativity and Confidence Through Number Play

Number Sense and Nonsense: Building Math Creativity and Confidence Through Number Play — page 3
no definite answers Many of the activities are easy for you to check you will decide whether they are correct See page 123 126 for the answers to some of the activities although you probably won't need to refer to the answer pages very often It's much more satisfying to work out the solutions yourself even if it takes time Some activities are harder than others and may be too difficult for you to complete at present Try them anyhow Discuss them with your friends or a grown up Your number sense will grow as you work on them even if you don't get the final answer correct And you will feel so proud when you do work out a hard problem But if you can't finish some of the activities now come back to them next year or the year after next You probably already know about odd and even num bers But did you know that an odd number might be even and an even number might be odd Chapter 1 is all about odds and evens Chapter 2 introduces other relationships among numbers You will have a chance to work on an idea called a conjecture about even numbers that no one has been able to prove either true or false although mathematicians have worked on it for over 200 years In Chapter 3 you will learn why zero is a very spe cial number For example we cannot divide a non zero number by zero When I try to divide six by zero